June 12, 2022
Tuesday’s City Council special meeting and public hearing on the proposed FY23 City of Lowell budget began at 6:30 pm and ended just before midnight. After five hours of deliberations, the council adopted the budget as presented without making any cuts.
Several residents spoke in opposition to the budget, urging councilors to make enough cuts to reduce the projected 5.5% property tax increase. Soaring inflation, the number of tax payers on fixed incomes, and the large number of tenants already paying astronomical rents were all cited as reasons for making cuts.
A number of cuts were proposed, almost all by Councilor Erik Gitschier. In most cases, Councilors Vesna Nuon and Kim Scott joined him in voting for the proposed cuts, but each of his motions failed, usually by 8 to 3 votes.
On the final vote to adopt the entire budget, Councilor Corey Robinson joined Gitschier, Nuon, and Scott in voting No which made the tally 7 votes for the budget versus 4 votes against. There was some confusion in the immediate aftermath of that vote. It’s well settled that for the council to make an appropriation requires a two-thirds majority vote so on Tuesday, it was assumed that the vote to adopt the budget needed a similar margin. Under the former 9 member city council, a two-thirds vote required 6 votes in favor, but the current 11 member council requires 8 votes to get over the two-thirds hurdle. With only 7 voting to adopt this budget, it seemed that the motion had failed. This created a momentary stalemate. At that point, the Council voted to take a 15-minute recess. During the recess, City Clerk Michael Geary reread the relevant state law on Plan E and found that the council vote to adopt the entire budget required only a simple majority of 6 votes rather than the two-thirds super majority of 8. Geary informed the Council of this upon its return from the recess and the budget was deemed to have passed on the previous vote.
In defending the budget against the proposed cuts, City Manager Tom Golden and Chief Financial Officer Conor Baldwin repeatedly cited the need to make revenue match expenditures. The longstanding (and ill-advised) approach of past councils has been to use budgetary tricks and one-time revenue sources to pay for the increased cost of services so that the annual increase in property taxes could be kept to a minimum. Providing services when not collecting sufficient revenue to pay for those services is unsound fiscal policy. It also jeopardizes the city’s bond rating which would mean that when it comes time to borrow money for capital projects such as the new high school, the city would pay a higher rate of interest than would be the case if operating costs were covered in full by normal, recurring tax revenue.
The only way to responsibly cut taxes is to cut services. Neither this council nor past councils have been willing to do that. As I mentioned in previous editions of this newsletter, City Manager Golden has repeatedly said that this council has made it clear that they want ENHANCED services and, because that desire for more services comes with the responsibility to pay for them, he was partly motivated in proposing the tax increase to carry out the guidance he has received from this council.
Golden also benefited from his short tenure on the job and from the unanimous support he received when elected City Manager earlier this year. I hesitate to use sports analogies but this one is applicable here: When Bill Parcels was the coach of the New England Patriots, he had a dispute with the owner over who would pick the players for the team. As Parcels famously put it, “If you want me to cook the meal, you’ve got to let me buy the groceries.”
In this case, the City Council unanimously hired Tom Golden to manage the city. In this budget proposal, Golden communicated to the council that these are the resources he needs to do that job in the best way possible. On Tuesday night, a majority of the council voted to give him the resources he says that he needs. A year from now that calculation might be different. At that point, Golden will have been in office for more than a year which will be ample time for him to identify and eliminate fat hidden within the budget. Because of that (and because next year is a city election year), councilors will be quicker to cut the FY24 budget than was the case this year.
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Cambridge hired a new City Manager last week. One of the only cities besides Lowell that uses the Plan E/City Manager form of government, Cambridge sidestepped the whole “professional or politician” new City Manager debate by hiring someone who is neither. On June 6, 2022, the Cambridge City Council by an 8 to 1 vote hired Yi-An Huang, a Boston Medical Center hospital executive with no municipal government experience to be the next City Manager. Huang, age 39, has lived in Cambridge for 15 years and has three children in the Cambridge Public Schools.
A Boston Globe article quotes one of the City Councilors on the search committee as saying about the new hire, “. . . he blew me away with the way he was able to take really complex subjects, talk about them from the perspective of a vision . . . and yet a practicality of how it is he might approach them.”
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Last week I wrote of the City Council’s interest in bringing more marijuana dispensaries into the city so that the city can continue collecting “impact fees” now that the first batch of dispensaries are approaching the five year cap on such payments. Friday’s Boston Globe reported on a study by Northeastern University that questioned the validity of these impact fees. Intended to offset any additional cost incurred by a community hosting a marijuana facility, critics call these fees a “government shakedown” of marijuana vendors. The Mass Municipal Association responded that such fees create an incentive for communities to host marijuana facilities.
In any case, the state legislature is contemplating proposals that would curtail these impact fees or at least require the municipalities charging them to demonstrate a direct correlation between the amount charged the dispensaries and the expenditure of municipal funds directly related to the marijuana business.
Coincidentally, a proposal for a new marijuana cultivation facility on Phoenix Ave is pending before the Planning Board.
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On June 19, 1865, US Army troops led by Major General Gordon Granger arrived at Galveston, Texas. The Civil War had ended a month earlier, but these were the first United States troops to arrive in Texas. General Granger immediately issued an order that stated, among other things, that “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”
A year later, Black residents of Texas celebrated the anniversary of that date, calling it Juneteenth (a blending of June and nineteenth).
Observations of Juneteenth have always been big in Texas, but national recognition of the day’s importance has grown in recent decades until last year it was proclaimed a Federal holiday. June 19th is a date-specific holiday which means it always falls on the 19th of June no matter what day of the week that is. (However, in accordance with Massachusetts law, since June 19 is a Sunday this year, the holiday will be “observed” on Monday, June 20, so government offices will be closed that day).
There will be a Juneteenth Celebration in Lowell next Sunday with a festival on Market Street organized by Free Soil Arts Collective. The festival will include a National Park hosted Lowell Walk on Lowell’s Black History. The walk will begin at noon on Sunday at the Lowell National Park Visitor Center at 246 Market Street.