Last Tuesday’s Council meeting got off to a confusing start due to 50 pages of corrections to the proposed city budget that were handed to Councilors just as the meeting was to start. Councilor Erik Gitschier said this was unfair to Councilors and to the public who had not had a chance to review accurate budget numbers. He asked the City Solicitor if changing the figures like that just as the meeting started violated the Open Meeting Law. The City Solicitor said that since the bottom line of the budget was the same in the original document as it was in the recently revised version, the corrected material did not limit the Council’s legal authority to go forward.
Councilor Rita Mercier moved that the Council go through the budget department by department and that when a department was first brought up, the City Manager’s staff could announce to everyone whether any change had been made to that department’s budget. This motion passed by a vote of 9 to 2 with Councilors Gitschier and Wayne Jenness voting against it. They presumably wanted to delay the public hearing so people would have more time to review the budget proposal the Council was acting upon.
City Manager Golden explained that the errors were the result of a combination of things. The cyber-attack created limits on access to information for many department heads. (I assume the cyber-attack also delayed preparations and caused the process to be rushed which cut down on time available to proofread and catch errors before making the document public.) But the proximate cause seemed to be that when data was transferred from department-level spreadsheets to a unified citywide spreadsheet and then into a Word document that produced the final “budget book,” some changes made in one place weren’t carried forward into the other places.
Once they decided to move forward that evening, Councilors made a few attempts to slice small amounts from the overall budget. Some such suggestions were accepted; others were rejected. In the end, the Council accepted the City Manager’s budget recommendation more or less intact.
A few Councilors made valedictory remarks before casting their votes in favor of the budget. A central theme was, “Residents have told us they want more services and this budget accomplishes that.”
The problem with that approach is that the average American dissociates their demand for more services from the cost of those increased services. A program that benefits me is good government; a program that benefits someone else is a waste of taxpayer money. Inevitably, the latter attitude predominates, just not right away.
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Proposals to amend city ordinances also drew a lot of attention at the Council meeting, particularly one to raise the parking rates for use of city garages. Mark Regan, an attorney who has lived downtown for decades, presented a strong indictment of this proposal. He stated that the city chose to pay for the newly constructed Hamilton Canal Innovation District garage entirely from the Parking Enterprise Fund. That means that parking revenue must cover not only the cost of operating and maintaining that garage and all the others, but the Enterprise Fund must also pay the annual debt on the long-term bonds that paid for the construction of the HCID garage.
Regan then observed that since hardly anyone is parking in the HCID garage, it generates little revenue. That means that all the other garage patrons must now pay the construction costs of the garage that neither they nor anyone else are using. He stated that if the garage is intended to provide some long term economic development benefits to the city, it should be all the residents of the city and not just those who must use the other downtown garages who pay for it.
He went on to criticize the city’s decision to convey a parcel of land next to the Lowell Justice Center to a private company and to allow that private company to construct its own garage – privately owned but open to the public – on that lot. That garage is still under construction but when it opens, in Regan’s view, many going to the Justice Center will park there rather than in the city’s garage (which is an eight minute walk from the Justice Center). This decision by the city made the private garage a “cash cow” at the expense of the city garage earning “chicken feed.”
When questioned on the fiscal state of the Parking Enterprise Fund, CFO Conor Baldwin said the fund ran a deficit of $2.3 million this year but surplus money in the Fund could cover that deficit for the coming fiscal year. However, unless there is an infusion of revenue into the Fund after that, the numbers will not balance in the future.
Councilors referred the proposed increase to their Finance Subcommittee for further discussion.
Downtown Lowell’s identity as a regional retail and business hub began fading in the early 1960s with the migration of households to the suburbs. To maintain the relevance of downtown, city leaders embraced a vision that had people living in suburbs and commuting to downtown Lowell for work, business, and shopping.
To facilitate that, they pursued two separate but mutually supportive strategies. The first was urban renewal which in theory was to replace “slums” with new housing, but as implemented in Lowell, involved demolishing old textile mills thought to be obsolete and beyond any value, in the hope that “new industry” would take their place.
The second leg of this strategy was to create high speed roads from the suburbs into downtown with ample parking lots so that suburban residents could speed to their jobs, find easy parking, go to work, and do their shopping before jumping in their cars and speeding back to their suburban homes. The result was roadways like the Lowell Connector, the Sampson Connector (Thorndike/Dutton Streets), and Father Morrissette Boulevard.
The flaw with this approach was that industry, retail, and businesses (like insurance, law, medicine and banking) all followed the households to the suburbs which left downtown Lowell (1) hollowed out and (2) segmented by highway-like roads that are antithetical to walkability.
Finally in the mid-1980s, city leaders recognized that the future of downtown, or at least a part of its future, was as a residential neighborhood and housing began to appear. That trend accelerated unevenly, mostly in concert with the broader housing market. Whenever real estate values soared, so did the economics of converting downtown office buildings to residences.
To me, one of the city’s ongoing problems is a schizophrenic attitude about downtown Lowell. Is it a residential neighborhood or a central business district? It can try to be both but neither will be done well. I believe the best use would be primarily residential with the understanding that mixed use development, with residences, retail, and business blended would work best, but with the dominant factor being the quality of life of those who reside in downtown.
Circling back to parking fees, the people who reside downtown are held hostage by the city’s parking system. They have no alternative other than to go carless which is not realistic in our city and our society. Whatever thinking went into creating the Parking Enterprise Fund should be reconsidered and perhaps unwound rather than imposing the burden of funding all the garages on those who have chosen to live downtown.
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A proposal to amend the ordinance governing pay for “positions not covered by collective bargaining” generated considerable discussion and disagreement. Here’s the relevant portion of the proposal:
“The City Manager shall hereby have the flexibility to advance an employee to any grade and/or step or tier above the current employee’s grade and/or step, upon written justification from the employee’s direct supervisor and determination, based on an examination of the current job market, that such movement is justified in his/her opinion. Any such movement must be deemed affordable within the current year’s budget by the Chief Financial Officer or his/her designee. Such flexibility shall not be construed to allow for the movement downward on the salary grid or tier.”
I’ll start by saying I have no direct knowledge of the details concerning how city employees are paid. However, as I understand it, employees who are members of a union bargain for, among other things, salaries and salary increases. There is considerable variation in those salaries, much of it driven by longevity.
Picture a spreadsheet (called a “grid or tier” in the ordinance). The columns are “grades”; the rows are “steps”. So the column headers across the top of the grid are Grade 4, Grade 5, Grade 6, and so on. Then the row headers coming down the left side of the spreadsheet are the steps, like Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, and Step 4.
Actual salary grids typically contain more than three grades and four steps, and the number plugged into individual cells of the grid are usually biweekly pay amounts, but let’s keep it simple for illustration purposes. In our example, the pay in Grade 4, Step 1 is $40,000 per year. The salary increases $3,000 with each step in that grade so Step 2 is $43,000; Step 3 is $46,000; and Step 4 is $49,000.
As a result of a collective bargaining agreement, the position of Clerk is placed in Grade 4, so when a new clerk is hired, they are placed in Grade 4, Step 1, and are paid $40,000 per year. On the anniversary of that person’s hiring, they advance a step within that grade so at the start of year two of employment, they move to Grade 4, Step 2, and earn $43,000. Each year, the employee progresses through the grid until they reach the top step which in our example is Grade 4, Step 4 with a salary of $49,000 per year. However, once that employee reaches the top step, they’re stuck there salary-wise. Unless they get a promotion to a new job in a higher grade, they have reached their maximum pay no matter how many years they remain in that position.
(Note that salaries also increase due to cost of living raises. If the Clerk’s union bargains for a 3% raise for the year, the Step 1 salary would increase from $40,000 to $41,200, and so on for the other steps).
Employees in a collective bargaining unit (i.e., a union) are pretty much locked into this system since everyone in the union has to be treated similarly, at least in theory.
That’s not the case with employees who are not in a union. However, about 30 years ago, the non-union employees of the city banded together and convinced the city to adopt salary grids for them, too. I assume they work the same way as the above-described union salary grids do.
With all of that as background, here’s the stated rationale for the proposed ordinance amendment: Some non-union employees have reached the maximum step of their salary grid. Other communities pay more for the same position so the employee is tempted to leave Lowell for higher pay elsewhere. This ordinance would give the City Manager the authority on a case-by-case basis to increase the salary of the subject employee by some amount in excess of the top step on the salary grid as a way to retain the person as a city employee.
Several Councilors, particularly Erik Gitschier and Corey Robinson, spoke against this, saying that it would be unfair to city employees in unions since they would not have the same ability to earn this customized job retention salary boost.
In the end, the ordinance amendment passed, but just barely. Voting in favor were Mayor Sokhary Chau and Councilors John Drinkwater, John Leahy, Rita Mercier, Dan Rourke, and Paul Yem. Voting against were Councilors Erik Gitschier, Wayne Jenness, Vesna Nuon, Corey Robinson, and Kim Scott.
thank you!