Tuesday’s council meeting began with Mayor Sokhary Chau presenting a commendation to Christine McCall, the head of the Department of Planning and Development and an assistant city manager. McCall is leaving city employment for the private sector where she will work as a project manager for Consigli Construction, a 120-year-old company that does $2.3 billion in work annually.
McCall’s departure was the lead story in last Sunday’s Lowell Sun “The Column” (“Another vacancy at Lowell City Hall,” August 21, 2022, p. A3). The Sun speculated that the volume of motions made by the city council may have been a factor in McCall’s departure, reporting that 25% of the 400 motions made by councilors this year were answered by her department. The Column added, “The volume of [McCall’s work] - and the relentless, weekly piling on of that work in an understaffed department that serves critical citizens and business needs – may have been another tipping point in her decision.”
Last week’s Sun article mentioned 400 motions as the number made by this council. There’s been another meeting since then, so the exact number is 427 motions since January. That’s over the course of 26 meetings which averages 16.4 motions per meeting. How does that compare to prior councils?
The 2016-17 council (Corey Belanger, Rodney Elliott, Ed Kennedy, Jim Leary, John Leahy, Rita Mercier, Jim Milinazzo, Dan Rourke, and Bill Samaras) had 27 meetings and made 195 motions during their first eight months for an average of 7.2 motions per meeting.
The 2018-19 council (Karen Cirillo, Dave Conway, Rodney Elliott, Ed Kennedy, John Leahy, Rita Mercier, Jim Milinazzo, Vesna Nuon, and Bill Samaras) had 25 meetings and made 224 motions during their first eight months for an average of 9.0 motions per meeting.
The 2020-21 council (Sokhary Chau, Dave Conway, John Drinkwater, Rodney Elliott, John Leahy, Rita Mercier, Vesna Nuon, Dan Rourke, and Bill Samaras) had 20 meetings and made 164 motions during their first eight months for an average of 8.2 motions per meeting.
An important distinction between the current council and previous ones is that this council has eleven members whereas prior councils had nine. But we can adjust for that to make sure we’re comparing apples to apples. An eleven member council is 22% bigger than a nine member council, so if we adjust the number of motions made by nine-member councils upwards by 22%, our comparison will be more accurate.
With that adjustment for the increased size of the 2022 council, here are the total number of motions made by each council during the first eight months of its two-year term:
2016 council – 238 motions
2018 council – 273 motions
2020 council – 200 motions
2022 council – 427 motions
Repeating that same adjustment, here are the average number of motions per meeting made by each council over the same period:
2016 council – 8.8 motions per meeting
2018 council – 10.9 motions per meeting
2020 council – 10.0 motions per meeting
2022 council – 16.4 motions per meeting
To quantify the numbers further (again, adjusting for the increased size of the council), the 2022 council has made 79% more motions than the 2016 council; 56% more than the 2018 council; and 113% more than the 2020 council.
You might ask, so what?
As last week’s Sun story illustrates, there are a finite number of managers employed by the city who respond to these motions. Those managers in turn have a finite amount of time in their work week. Every hour devoted to writing a motion response is an hour taken away from other duties like managing the work of their departments.
Before you dismiss the time spent on motion responses as trivial, check out last week’s city council packet which was 295 pages long. Scroll through it. Each motion response is a customized memo from a department head to the city manager who forwards it to the council. While some councilors criticize the conclusions of some memos, no one can criticize the quality of the writing and composition. As someone who does a lot of writing both for work and otherwise, I can attest that these reports have to take a substantial amount of time to create. So the question is, what’s not getting done because of all the time spent answering all these motions?
One thing that doesn’t appear to be getting done is long range planning. The city has an excellent master plan called Sustainable Lowell 2025 that was adopted by the council in 2013 after a two year drafting process. The Department of Planning and Development has a page titled “Comprehensive Master Plan Update – Resilient Lowell 2040” which announced the need to update the master plan but only says that DPD is selecting a consultant to assist with the plan’s development and invites residents interested in serving on a steering committee to submit a resume.
The 2013 master plan was a comprehensive roadmap for moving the city forward. It set priorities of effort and expenditure and was the product of a two-year effort of DPD employees and numerous city residents. (I believe the work was all done in house and that no consultant was used). Sustainable Lowell 2025 was unanimously adopted by the city council in the spring of 2013 – and was never mentioned again on the floor of the council. It still hasn’t been mentioned and if the update has come up in council meetings this year, it’s only been in a cursory manner.
An organization as large and complex as the government of the city of Lowell cannot operate effectively without detailed long range planning and a commitment to abide by plans. Certainly, plans must change along with circumstances, but it’s far better to modify an existing plan than to make it up as you go along.
Which brings me back to the volume of motions by this city council. There’s a “make it up as you go along” vibe to it all. Many of the motions deal with things like potholes and streetlights – more on them below – but other motions involve major policy decisions. Some of the ideas might be good ones, but there’s no evidence of coordination beyond a random “joint motion” that creates a whiff of cooperation. Under our Plan E form of government, the job of the council is to hire the city manager, provide the city manager with some guidance on the big picture direction of the city, and adopt a budget that gives the city manager the resources needed, and then let the manager manage. If the council is not satisfied with the manager’s performance, the remedy is to replace the manager, not act as shadow managers or shadow department heads. That’s when things go bad. In the short run, there may seem to be a flurry of activity, but the city pays the price in the long run.
Councilors also have the authority to inquire of the city manager about the affairs of a city. That’s how councilors evaluate a city manager. And that’s where “constituent services” rightly enter the picture. But is making a formal motion each time a resident asks about a missing streetlight or crosswalk the best way to go about it? The number of people in the city who will contact a city councilor is a miniscule percentage of the city’s population. There are plenty of people who need street lights and crosswalks who won’t or don’t contact city councilors. Wouldn’t it be better for councilors to insist on a system that gets the job done equitably for everyone rather than for the small and self-selected group who call city councilors? Why should someone who calls a city councilor jump to the top of the queue for getting a streetlight or a cross walk while everyone else who needs one gets bumped further down the list? With limits on the resources available, that’s what happens.
Individuals run for office because they’re motivated to serve the public and they enjoy doing so. But once someone is elected, it’s natural to think about being reelected. If you draw a Venn diagram of people who call city councilors and people who vote, there would be a lot of overlap. Making a motion about a constituent complaint is more performative than making a simple phone call so there are a lot of these types of motions. On at least two occasions, Councilor Dan Rourke has plaintively urged his colleagues to use the phone call approach as a way of cutting down on the volume of these types of motions but to no avail.
When the new district system of electing councilors was debated, one of the most compelling reasons for adopting it was to increase the involvement in city affairs of people in neighborhoods with low voter participation. With a district system that guaranteed at least one councilor from each district, the thinking was that people living in that district who may have been benignly neglected by the all at large councilor system would feel more connected to city government when at least one councilor lived in the same neighborhood.
Is the new system working? Councilors would say yes, that all of these motions are needed to make up for the neglect their neighborhoods have suffered under the prior system. The people from the neighborhood who are calling councilors and getting their needs addressed would agree. But the true test will come in the next election. The key indicator will not be who runs or who is elected but who votes. Will turnout in the various districts increase? If yes, that means the new system is getting people not previously involved to participate in city affairs. But if district turnout stays the same or goes down, it means the same people who were already participating in city politics continue to do so only now with a dedicated neighborhood councilor to attend to their needs.
In the meantime, we’re left to ask, what’s the strategy for moving Lowell forward? Big initiatives take years to conceive, refine, fund, and execute. It’s hard to do that when you’re trapped on a treadmill of endless motions and motion responses.
******
One encouraging initiative that was unveiled Tuesday night was a partnership between Lowell city government and Middlesex Community College in which MCC will provide Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training to city leaders. City Manager Tom Golden and MCC President Phil Sisson have developed a three year program whereby 30 of the top managers in the city will participate in semester-long, weekly workshops, led by members of MCC’s Center for Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation. Fifteen Lowell managers will attend eight 2-hour sessions (Mondays at lunchtime) in the fall semester, then fifteen more will do the same program in the spring semester. The program will be repeated with the same managers but with new content for three consecutive years. Concurrently, MCC will do a series of presentations to city of Lowell employees who are not participating in the training to acquaint those employees with the vocabulary and theories to which their managers are being exposed in the formal training.
Finding ways to have city government work more closely with Middlesex Community College (and UMass Lowell also) is a good thing, no matter what the topic but especially on something as important as DEI training. This looks like a great initiative. A big question is, will the city be committed to actually doing the program or will the managers feel pressured to skip sessions because of competing job demands (like answering council motions)? Manager Golden addressed this pretty emphatically by saying the program is being managed out of his office. If the city manager is committed to the program and checking attendance, the employees will show up.
******
Another bit of good news from Tuesday’s meeting was a presentation on the Lowell High renovation project. Councilors had all attended a meeting the week before and were apparently so pleased with the project’s progress that they asked the city manager to repeat the presentation at the council meeting which has a wider viewership.
Representatives from Suffolk Construction and the other companies involved in the project gave a slide show that featured up-to-date photos of the new gymnasium which will be ready for use by students when they return to school this coming Wednesday. The pictures make the place look phenomenal. Demolition of the old field house is progressing too. Once that’s down, construction of the new freshmen academy building at the corner of Arcand Drive and French Street Extension will commence. Throughout it all, a multitude of related tasks will take place in the other two buildings.
Thank you for the informative update.
One would imagine that Manager Holden has taken advantage of all the leeway given to new hires by privately asking Council members to help his organization by NOT filing motions unless the issue goes unaddressed for a certain period of time (assuming it is not critical in nature). Recognizing that internal protocols may require a response by the relevant agency, maybe a simple “check the box” in a pre-existing form would be sufficient? In private industry, I certainly do not write reports once a task is completed (certainly not the changing of lightbulbs!), I just tell interested parties that the task is “done”, and folks accept it and move on. There must be an acceptable simpler way… and addressing this time-sink does warrant a motion!
I suspect that the main issue here is lack of trust in the management organization at the City of Lowell. If true, then building organizational credibility should be one of Mr. Holder’s top medium term goals.
As someone who has read “Sustainable Lowell 2025” a few times, I agree with your commentary on the need to refresh it. Even if the document is not often referenced in the council, I can attest from experience in creating similar documents that the effort of “going through the process” of developing the report is often of tremendous value itself. People meet, ideas flourish, energy is created and the benefits multiply, even if seemingly randomized. Another mid-term goal which I’m sure is part of Mr. Holden’s growing list.
And by the way, thank you Richard for these write-ups, they are unfailingly informative and easy to read for such a potentially “dry” subject matter. You do great work.