The most important duty of the Lowell City Council is to hire a City Manager and then let that person run city government. But an equally important task implied by that duty is to evaluate the City Manager and to hold the Manager accountable. There is usually a formal evaluation document completed by Councilors annually, but as Councilor Dan Rourke has said, “Councilors evaluate the City Manager every Tuesday night.”
How that happens was illustrated on Tuesday night during a response to a Councilor Erik Gitschier request for information on ADA sidewalk ramp repairs. When the proposed contract for this work came up early last spring, city officials indicated that approximately 200 ramps would be completed during the 2022 construction season. However, this week we learned that only 33 had been done. In his comments and by his questions, Councilor Gitschier identified the cause of the shortfall as a delay in finalizing the contract with the vendor who was to perform the work. The city’s traffic engineer had submitted the contract for approval in March, but the contract wasn’t executed until August, so much of the construction season was gone by the time work could begin.
Government contracting is complicated. It’s not like a homeowner who enters an agreement with a contractor to have work done. In the homeowner’s case, the two issues are (1) am I willing to pay the amount asked for by the contractor; and (2) when is the contractor going to show up? For a governmental entity to hire a contractor requires many more steps and approvals. There are good reasons for that, however, the complexity of the process can also become a crutch used to explain away inefficiencies and delays.
In the case of the sidewalk ramp repairs, was the delay due to the contractor or was it caused by the city? If the latter, where was the bottleneck? Was this a onetime occurrence or is it symptomatic of a bigger problem? A forthcoming response from the City Manager to Councilor Gitschier’s questions should help answer those questions.
It could be that the cause of the delay was that the various mid- and upper-level city officials responsible for getting the contract executed were so overwhelmed by the flood of City Council motions that they had to answer and which took a higher priority that they didn’t have time to get the ADA ramp contract done.
Somehow I suspect that won’t be City Manager Golden’s answer, even if it’s the case.
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Two things this Council likes to talk about – trash disposal and snow removal – were addressed at Tuesday’s meeting.
The snow discussion was triggered by a Councilor Gitschier motion for a report on the number of cars towed by the city during a recent Snow Emergency Parking Ban. City Manager Tom Golden, after first acknowledging that the storm dropped just two inches of snow, gave an entirely reasonable response praising the work of city employees in getting people to move their cars in the midst of the storm in a way that facilitated effective plowing of the streets. There was an awkward pause as Golden waited for Councilors to echo his praise of city employees (as councilors almost always do), but that didn’t happen this time. Instead, a vigorous debate broke out among Councilors on whether the policy of towing cars in snow emergencies should be strictly enforced or not. (The pro enforcement side wanted to avoid mixed messages while the lax enforcement side argued that many residents in outlying areas lack off-street parking options). We’ll likely have a replay of this whenever the response to this motion returns to the agenda.
Also on Tuesday, the Council drilled down into the issue of contamination of recycled materials picked up by city trash contractors. As I understand it, the contract the city has with the recycling company imposes a financial penalty on the city when items that aren’t recyclable – like a bag of kitchen garbage – are included in the recycling bin and placed into the recycling stream. This issue arose in a response to a Councilor Gitschier motion for a report on the rate of recycling contamination.
There followed an extended discussion by Councilors on whether the recycling truck drivers should be required to use truck-mounted-side-looking cameras to visually inspect recycling bins before picking them up, and if the driver noted any contamination, they should not pick it up. The city employee responding to this said that strategy would typically result in a call from the homeowner that their recycling container had been missed and the city would immediately dispatch a truck to pick it up (or face future criticism by councilors for not picking up recycling). That led to a discussion about drivers notifying the city’s Recycling Office that address X was skipped on purpose due to visible contamination so that when the person who lived at address X called to complain, they could be lectured on the evils of contaminated recycling.
Granted, this is an important issue. If someone fills their recycling bin with ordinary trash, we all pay more for it. And multiply that by 100 or 1000 people doing it and the costs are substantial. But Councilors hire a City Manager to manage the operation of the city and doing that becomes a lot more difficult when Councilors get bogged down in the level of operational detail that this Council regularly does, as seen in both the snow emergency and recycling contamination discussions.
Wednesday morning when Golden and his management team convened to create their To Do list from the Council meeting, did they instruct the recycling coordinator to devise a plan to reduce contamination and then provide monthly statistics to measure that, or did they decide to purchase cameras for recycling trucks and kick the real issue down the road because cameras on trucks is what Councilors seemed interested in?
Councilors should let managers manage and then assess the job being done. If the council’s expectations are not being met, their recourse is to replace the City Manager.
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Another big responsibility of a City Council is to develop a strategic plan for the city that the City Manager can then execute. I’ve argued that the lack of housing, particularly housing that’s affordable for many of the people who want to live in Lowell, is perhaps the biggest issue the city faces. Take care of housing and many of the other issues the Council spends a lot of time on will take care of themselves.
A couple of housing initiatives that the Council has taken up this term were in the news this week. A Boston Globe editorial on Monday argued that the single biggest thing Governor Maura Healey can do to help solve the state’s housing crisis is to strictly enforced the recently-enacted “MBTA Communities Law.” This statute requires the 175 municipalities serviced by the MBTA (including Lowell with its Commuter Rail station) to change zoning laws to allow as a matter of right multifamily housing within a certain distance of public transit stations. This past Tuesday was the deadline for municipalities to submit their “action plans” to the state.
Back in August, the Lowell City Council took up a proposed zoning change that would create the “Gallagher Station TOD Overlay District” (with TOD standing for transit oriented development). I assume the city has submitted its plan to the state (although in a few minutes of looking, I wasn’t able to find it on the city’s website). I don’t believe the Council has revisited this proposal since August, although the city does have more time to enact the zoning changes required.
With the Gallagher Terminal being a commuter rail station as well as the hub of the Lowell Regional Transit Authority and with regular bus service from there to Lawrence by the Merrimack Valley Transit Authority, building more housing units within walking distance of the place would be a big win for the city.
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On Tuesday, the New York Times wrote about the rising popularity of “accessory dwelling units” or ADUs. An ADU is a second dwelling unit constructed on an existing lot, usually with a single family house already on it. The ADU can be a detached structure, or a converted garage or basement. ADUs have their own kitchens and entrances. They resemble the traditional “in-law apartment” but ADUs do not require the occupants of the ADU and the main house to be related.
The focus of the Times article was on the popularity of ADUs among an aging population. However, the many instances cited in the article of parents and adult children occupying the ADUs were misleading, because housing advocates point to ADUs as much more than the traditional in-law apartment. ADUs are a valuable tool for creating more housing and to make it more affordable.
Several months ago, Councilor John Drinkwater proposed amending the city’s zoning ordinance to allow ADUs and immediately asked that the proposal be sent to a subcommittee to obtain public input. Although I haven’t watched any of the subsequent subcommittee meetings, I know there have been a couple of them and believe there has been some opposition to this idea. Much of the concern revolves around parking, which is already in short supply in many parts of the city. Nevertheless, this seems like an interesting idea for the City Council to pursue, so hopefully it will come back and be enacted in a thoughtful way when the time is right.
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Today is the 45th anniversary of the Blizzard of ’78. On richardhowe.com I’ve posted a story of my experience in that storm. Given the record-setting low temperatures of this weekend, my Blizzard of ’78 story is a reminder that things can always get worse.
In Lowell, I highly doubt ADUs will be used for anything outside of extended family. Theee is already a massive number of multigenerational families living in single family homes here. There’s a building in my hood that has four vertical generations, and many sideways relatives- cousins, etc. Were there to be an inspection, multiple kitchens would be found, I’m told.