June 18, 2023
Last Tuesday’s City Council meeting had another light agenda which seems partly due to the City Administration’s focus on the FY24 budget which will have a public hearing at this coming Tuesday’s meeting, and because of the lingering effects of the April 24 cyberattack.
Perhaps the substantive highlight of last week’s meeting was the report by Councilor Rita Mercier of the combined Finance and Neighborhood Subcommittees meeting from June 1, 2023. Two major items were covered. First, was a proposed adjustment to the cost of residential parking placards and the procedure for obtaining and maintaining them, and second was this year’s recommendations for the Community Preservation Act expenditure.
Let’s begin with the Residential Reserved Parking Sign. According to the city’s website, “every homeowner in the City of Lowell is allowed to apply for a reserved parking sign [with some restrictions].” The sign can be affixed to the front of your house or your front yard fence and reserves a 20 foot parking spot in front of the house that can be used by any “car owner who lives in the property.”
Currently, one of these signs costs $10 and is good for one year, but it can be renewed on a year-by-year basis for the same $10 annual fee.
Some flaws in the current procedure were identified. The $10 fee does not cover the cost of the sign or its installation, which is done by city employees (the signs cost the city $50 each to purchase). Many of the signs now in place have not been renewed, yet they are still visible and presumably still reserving spaces that haven’t been paid for. Also, there have been instances of perceived abuse by a few sign holders.
Because of this, the subcommittee voted to recommend that the fee for a residential parking sign be increased to $120 per year and that the fee be linked to the Consumer Price Index so that it increases automatically as the cost-of-living increases. The subcommittee members also emphasized the need to strictly enforce this ordinance, particularly by repossessing signs that have not been renewed.
The Council only voted to accept this as a report of progress. At this coming week’s Council meeting, there will be a vote on an ordinance amendment that will amend parking fees, however, the residential parking sign fee does not appear to be part of that ordinance. Still, City Manager Golden in his comments seemed committed to reforming the residential parking sign process, so it will likely come back to the Council in the future for further action.
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The other issue covered by the subcommittee was this year’s Community Preservation Act awards.
By way of background, the Community Preservation Act was signed into law in Massachusetts in 2000. It allows the residents of municipalities to vote by election referendum to raise property taxes by up to 3 percent with the money so raised dedicated to preservation of open space, creation of affordable housing, preservation of historic sites and creation or improvement of outdoor recreation facilities. As an incentive for communities to adopt the Act, the state created a Community Preservation Trust Fund to contribute state money to funds raised locally.
The money for the Community Preservation Trust Fund comes from a surcharge on documents recorded at the registry of deeds. Initially, the surcharge was $20 per document, but on December 31, 2019, the surcharge increased to $50 per document to better fund the CPA.
In the November 5, 2019, city election, the voters of Lowell overwhelmingly adopted the Community Preservation Act. There were 5,026 votes in favor (58 percent) versus 3,653 votes against (42 percent). Of the 33 precincts in the city, 29 voted Yes and only 4 voted No. This made Lowell the 176th community in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to adopt the CPA.
As adopted in Lowell, there is a Community Preservation Committee that meets regularly, accepts applications for CPA grants, holds hearings on those applications, and makes recommendations to the City Council on which should be funded. The City Council then approves or rejects those recommendations.
According to the city’s website, the Community Preservation Committee members are:
Adam Baacke (chair)
Francesca Cigliano (vice chair)
Sinead Gallivan
Troy Depeiza
Philip Shea
Sidney Liang
Brad Buitenhuys
Yovani Baez-Rose
Ryan Rourke
The Community Preservation Committee recommended funding for five projects which were:
O’Donnell Park on Gorham Street; applicant was city of Lowell; qualifies as open space & recreation; amount recommended was $550,000.
Hadley House at 719 Broadway; applicant was Lowell Housing Authority; qualifies as affordable housing; amount recommended was $150,000.
Girls Inc. on Worthen Street; applicant was Girls Inc.; qualifies as historic preservation; amount recommended was $135,000.
James Boyle Building at 635 Middlesex Street; qualifies as historic preservation; amount recommended was $100,000.
St. George’s Church at 44 Princeton Boulevard; qualifies as historic preservation (to restore gold dome).
The subcommittee voted unanimously to approve these projects. Based on this portion of the subcommittee report, the full council voted unanimously to adopt the report as a report of progress and to adopt the vote of the subcommittee. As a result, I believe these projects all received their final approval by the Council by that vote.
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Coincidentally, the Boston Globe last week wrote about the Community Preservation Act. In “Local funds meant to support housing are sometimes used to block it, report finds”, the newspaper used a recent CPA expenditure by the city of Peabody, Massachusetts, to illustrate what’s happening. In that case, a developer was trying to develop an 80-acre wooded parcel near the Salem line into a housing development. The Mayor of Peabody opposed the plan and pulled together $7.2 million in city funds to buy the land and preserve it as open space. The funding included $2 million from the Community Preservation Act.
The story explains that the CPA requires that a municipality allocate at least 10 percent of its total CPA expenditure to each of three areas: Housing, historic preservation, and open space. The report cited in the story maintains that many communities, particularly suburbs, are failing to expend the required amount on housing and that many that are meeting the 10 percent requirement are simply putting that money in a housing trust fund and not spending it on anything.
Housing advocates say that with the state in a profound housing crisis, the CPA should be tweaked by the state legislature to put more emphasis on housing. This wouldn’t be a problem for Lowell since the city has allocated a good amount of CPA funding to housing, but housing is a regional asset and if other communities aren’t pulling their weight in building more of it, the pressure on Lowell prices and rents will keep rising.
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Speaking of housing, there’s a bill pending in the legislature (H.2747) that would give cities and towns the option to impose an excise tax of between 0.5 percent and 2 percent on some real estate sales with the resulting money used to fund affordable housing.
Early in the 20th century, the Federal government imposed a tax on the transfer of real estate. The amount of the tax was based on the sales price of the property. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts eventually adopted a similar tax. The Federal version was discontinued at some point, but the Massachusetts deeds excise tax continues today. The rate is $2.28 per $500 is sales price. So, for example, if you sold a house for $500,000, you would pay a deeds excise tax of $2,280. The seller is responsible for paying the tax and it is paid to the registry of deeds at the time the deed is recorded.
Other versions of this local option excise tax had it apply only to sales of $1 million or more, but since that would exclude almost all sales in most places, I believe the newest version would permit a municipality to set the threshold for imposing the tax at the median sales price of a single-family home in the county in which the property was located.
This bill is pending before the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Revenue and there’s no indication it will be enacted anytime soon.
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The electronic version of The Lowell Review 2023 is now available for reading on richardhowe.com. Among the stories included in this issue are one by Jen Myers on Rollie’s Farm; an interview of Brad Buitenhuys about Lowell Litter Krewe; an article by UMass Lowell architectural historian Marie Frank on Eugene Weisberg, an MIT-trained architect from Lowell who designed a number of commercial buildings and residences in Lowell; a series of articles on The Beatles including two by writers who saw them in person. The print version The Lowell Review 2023 can be purchased online for $15 plus postage.
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Happy Bunker Hill Day!
Happy Juneteenth!