July 28, 2024

The big news from Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting was the selection of Corey Belanger to serve the unexpired term of District 3 (Belvidere) Councilor John Leahy who resigned after taking a job with the Lowell School Department last week. This outcome surprised me, not because Belanger was selected but because the council continued down the appointment path rather than reconsider the special election option.

As I wrote in my newsletter two weeks ago, the mechanism in place for filling a vacancy on the city council was for the losing candidate with the most votes in the last election to be offered the seat and, if there was no such candidate, then the remaining city councilors would select a successor councilor by majority vote.

From the time Plan E was adopted in Lowell in the late 1940s, there have been many council vacancies, but until the adoption of the at-large/district hybrid council system prior to the 2021 election, there never had been a case without a runner up candidate to fill the vacancy. However, that “no runner up” scenario became a distinct possibility after the 2023 election in which two districts had only one candidate each: District 1 with Dan Rourke and District 3 with John Leahy.

Sure enough, earlier this month Councilor Leahy was hired by the Lowell School Department which required him to resign his council seat, something he apparently did Tuesday (although it’s not clear exactly when that happened).

Since the adoption of the district system, councilors have been aware of this possibility and a few years ago made a half-hearted attempt to create another mechanism for filling a vacancy. Earlier this year, perhaps when rumors of Leahy’s job aspirations may have trickled out, councilors made a more determined effort to create a special election mechanism for filling any vacancy on the council. That bill began its journey through the legislature as Senate Bill 2762.

However, at the July 9, 2024, council meeting, with the vacancy still only prospective since Leahy had not yet resigned, Councilor Rita Mercier made a motion to proceed with the council appointing a successor to Leahy rather than wait for the special election enabling legislation to pass. Several of the councilors who supported this motion cited their preference for a special election but feared the legislative process would become so bogged down that it would leave the District 3 seat vacant for an unreasonable period of time. In the end, Mercier’s motion passed by a 7 to 3 vote with YES votes coming from Mayor Rourke and Councilors Mercier, Kim Scott, Paul Ratha Yem, Sokhary Chau, John Descoteaux and Wayne Jenness. Voting NO were Councilors Erik Gitschier, Vesna Nuon and Corey Robinson.

The next day, however, Councilor Wayne Jenness filed a motion to reconsider that motion. Jenness, it turns out, favored a special election but by the time the roll call vote reached him, it already had enough votes to pass so he voted YES to enable him to file the motion to reconsider since only someone on the prevailing side of a vote may file such a motion.

Because of the every-other-week summer meeting schedule, Jenness’s motion gave the pro-special election forces two weeks to mobilize a lobbying effort to get councilors to reverse their vote. At the same time, Senator Ed Kennedy shared considerable information about the progress of the bill which left the impression that passage of the bill, if not imminent, could happen very soon.

According to the State Legislature’s “Bill History” page, here was S2762/S2878’s procedural history as of Tuesday’s council meeting (which was July 23):

•  May 2, 2024 – Bill referred to the committee on Election Laws

• May 6, 2024 – House concurred

• May 21, 2024 – Hering scheduled on May 21, 2024, with written testimony only

• May 30, 2024 – Bill reported favorably by committee and placed in the Orders of the Day for the next session

• June 13, 2024 – Read second and ordered to a third reading

• July 18, 2024 – Taken out of the Notice Section

• July 18, 2024 – Read third (title changed)

• July 18, 2024 – New draft substituted, see S2878

• July 18, 2024 – [Substituted bill] passed to be engrossed

• July 18, 2024 – Read and referred to the committee on House Steering, Policy and Scheduling

• July 19, 2024 – Committee reported that the matter be placed in the Orders of the Day for the next sitting

• July 19, 2024 – Rules suspended

• July 19, 2024 – Read second and ordered to a third reading

State Representative Rodney Elliott attended this week’s council meeting and reported on the above. One significant change that was recommended by the legislature was to specify that no preliminary election would be held in case of a special election. The council seemed completely agreeable to this, and when the City Solicitor suggested that such a change exceeded the authority the council had previously delegated to the City Manager to make minor amendments, the Council specifically voted to authorize the City Manager to ask for the “no preliminaries” amendment. Representative Elliott asked that City Clerk Michael Geary notify him as soon as the official paperwork was ready at City Hall so he could pick it up and personally convey it to the legislature for further action. Once that happened, it seemed that passage would occur promptly.

But not soon enough to have a special election to fill the seat vacated by Leahy.

Despite a number of residents speaking in favor of the council “reconsidering” the prior vote to proceed with an appointment and wait for the special election legislation to be enacted, the council defeated the motion to reconsider with YES (to reconsider) votes coming from Councilors Jenness, Gitschier, Nuon, and Robinson and NO (to not reconsider) votes coming from Mayor Rourke and Councilors Mercier, Scott, Yem, Chau, and Descoteaux.

Before Mayor Rourke could call for the vote selecting the new councilor to be taken, Councilor Jenness interrupted and asked that motion 4-12 be taken out of order. That was a motion jointly filed by Councilors Gitschier and Robinson that requested the city council to “take a vote to support Home Rule Petition S2878 and allow the maximum amount of time per city charter for the state to approve S2878 before taking any other action.” Although motions to take things out of order are routinely adopted, often without even an actual voice vote, Mayor Rourke called for a roll call vote on the motion to take this motion out of order. That motion failed with the same 4 to 6 split as on the reconsideration motion.

Mayor Rourke then moved on to the appointment of a new city councilor. He first went through the list of nine individuals who had put forth their names for the seat. Four were present and got the opportunity to address the council. They were Corey Belanger, Erin Gendron, Belinda Juran, and Rithy Uong. The other applicants, Karina Fontanez, Ronald DiBerto, Adam Mitchell, Daniel Finn, and Martin Burke were not present so nothing more was heard from or about them.

Clerk Geary then called the roll with each councilor stating their preferred candidate by name. Corey Belanger received a majority of the votes and was selected. Voting for him were Mayor Rourke and Councilors Mercier, Scott, Yem, Chau and Descoteaux. The remaining four councilors – Gitschier, Jenness, Nuon and Robinson – all voted PRESENT.

Our newest councilor has served on the body before. He first ran for the council in 2011 but finished fourteenth. He ran again in 2013, this time successfully, finishing seventh. He was reelected in 2015, finishing eighth, but then lost in 2017, finishing twelfth. Belanger launched a comeback attempt in 2019 but finished tenth. He also ran for an At Large Council seat in last fall’s city election, finishing fourth behind the three winners, Erik Gitschier, Rita Mercier and Vesna Nuon.

It turns out that when State Representative Elliott told the council at the July 23 meeting that passage of the special election bill was imminent, he wasn’t lying. The bill was enacted by the legislature the very next day (July 24, 2024) and Governor Maura Healey signed the bill the day after that which means the special election law was in place less than 48 hours after six councilors appointed Corey Belanger to fill the District 3 seat which had only been vacant for moments if at all since Leahy actually participated in this very council meeting.

Why the six councilors who on Tuesday night went ahead with the vote to appoint a new councilor rather than wait a bit longer to see if the special election legislation passed is unclear to me. Having watched the meeting two weeks ago, I was left with the clear impression that the councilors pushing the appointment process actually preferred the special election route, but were convinced that the chances of passing the legislation needed to hold a special election in a timely manner were slim, so rather than leave the seat vacant for an extended period and deprive the residents of Belvidere of their own District Councilor, they thought it best to act now and appoint someone.

That position seemed reasonable until Senator Kennedy spoke up the next day with news that the latest bill was not bound for legislative purgatory but was on the verge of passage. The information publicly available on the legislature’s bill history website corroborated that. Given this new development, surely the council would pause the appointment process if only for a couple of weeks, to allow the bill to cross the finish line. But that’s not what happened. For whatever reason, Mayor Rourke and Councilors Mercier, Scott, Yem, Chau and Descoteaux pushed through the appointment of Belanger without any further explanation.

Well, Councilor Descoteaux did pivot from the “we don’t want to deprive Belvidere of representation for too long” explanation to an entirely new one: the City Election Office does not have the capacity to run a special election prior to the end of the year. He was aided in that assertion by the city’s soon-to-be-retired Director of Elections, Greg Pappas, who had some truly disturbing things to say about the conduct of recent city elections and the upcoming Presidential election this November.

You can watch Councilor Descoteaux’s exchange with Pappas at 1:11:23 of the LTC YouTube recording of the meeting. Descoteaux started by asking, “Can you tell me, in your professional opinion, can we pull this off before December?” After explaining that the person who has been hired to replace him (who has yet to be publicly identified) is highly qualified, Pappas explained that in the 2020 presidential election, 38,000 people in Lowell voted and 20% of them used mail in ballots. He said mail in ballots are much more labor intensive for his office to process than are ballots cast in person at the polling place on election day. Pappas went on to say, “This is probably going to be the biggest presidential election since Abraham Lincoln; we could have 50,000 or 60,000 [votes] in Lowell. And now the mail-ins are averaging about 70 percent” He kept referring to “5 people with 5 machines” by which I assume he means the five employees in the election office. He then said, “We barely made the last election in time with the mail in ballots . . . if we have that many mail in ballots, I don’t see how we’re going to get them processed . . . so I don’t know how we’re going to be able to do a city [election] at the same time. If there were a lot of candidates, I don’t even know how we would have the time to do the certification of the nomination signatures. It’s going to be really difficult to do.”

To this Descoteaux replied, “So this is my worry, then. We can’t guarantee an election result by December.” He admitted that even though the city council’s Rules Subcommittee, of which he is a member, previously recommended that if a vacancy occurs within the first year of the term (as this one has) that a special election be held, but now in light of the city’s Director of Elections telling the council that the elections office could not reliably run a special election this fall, “this is my dilemma right now,” said Descoteaux, meaning this is why he wanted to appoint someone to the seat now rather than try to hold a special election in the fall.

Pappas went on to criticize the US Post Office for being unreliable with the delivery of mail in ballots, saying, “I had over 400 ballots that were late just for the city council race alone that didn’t get counted. In the state election, it was like 1,100 or 1,200. This one is probably going to be 3,000 or 4,000. . . We have so much to handle with this. . .”

So here you have the city’s Director of Elections saying that the votes of 400 residents were not counted in the 2023 city council race, that the votes of between 1,100 and 1,200 residents were not counted in the 2022 gubernatorial election, and then predicted that between 3,000 and 4,000 ballots that will be cast in Lowell in the coming Presidential election will not be counted.

Instead of being outraged by this mass disenfranchisement of Lowell voters and vowing to get to the bottom of it, Descoteaux replied, “I appreciate your honesty” then went on to say since there is no guarantee that the city is capable of holding a special election to fill the vacant council seat sometime this fall, he was “ready to fill the seat tonight.”  

Neither the “we can’t wait for the legislature to act” explanation nor the newer, “our Elections Office isn’t capable of conducting a special election this fall” excuse are credible. This urgency to get Corey Belanger onto the council has another explanation but what that is remains unclear right now.

Perhaps more importantly, the utter lack of interest councilors have shown in following up on Pappas’s statement that hundreds of people who have cast their votes in recent Lowell elections have not had their votes counted is disturbing but not surprising. Here’s what I wrote two weeks ago:

A lack of contested seats contributes to a lack of voter participation. When a lack of choices on the ballot dictates the outcome of the election, it’s predictable that residents will conclude their votes make no difference and skip the election. That’s likely why fewer than ten percent of all those registered participated. The 7,516 people who did vote in November 2023 was the fewest in any city election since the Civil War. The city council really should spend more time talking about that, but perhaps they prefer it to be that way. The fewer people who vote, the easier it is for incumbents to keep them satisfied.

Failing to follow up on the news that hundreds of Lowell voters have been disenfranchised in the past few elections; not pushing back when the city’s Election Director publicly disparages voting by mail which is an option with the potential to greatly increase the number of people who vote by making it easier to do so; pushing through the appointment of a new city councilor when the legal mechanism to hold a special election to fill the vacancy was just 48 hours away; making hundreds of motions about filling pot holes but not one about increasing turnout in city elections; all reinforce my earlier conclusion that the current city council as a whole is quite content with letting a tiny minority of Lowell’s residents decide who controls city government.