March 26, 2023

Last Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting had a mammoth agenda due to the March 14th meeting having been cancelled because of a snowstorm. Everything from that meeting’s agenda was rolled over to this week which had its own complement of motions responses and new motions. By 10 pm, the Council had just made it through the Motion Response section of the agenda. With at least 20 new motions awaiting action, the Council recessed the meeting to Saturday, March 25 (yesterday, if you’re reading this newsletter on Sunday). I was unable to watch the Saturday meeting live so nothing about it is included here. However, I will watch a replay and report on it next Sunday.

As for the items that were covered last Tuesday night, many were significant, but here are some that stood out for me:

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The Council received an update on steps taken to implement recommendations from the 2019 Summit on Homelessness. Many things are still “in progress” which is a bureaucratic way of saying they haven’t been accomplished yet. For instance, while the city has hired a Director of Homelessness Initiatives (Maura Fitzpatrick), it has not appointed a Homelessness Coordinating Council.

The primary objective that emerged from that Summit was “Housing First” which means that if you focus on housing, many of the other problems will take care of themselves. The high cost of housing and the continual lack of affordable housing are, not surprisingly, major obstacles to achieving this goal. The current report identified the acute shortage of housing arrangements that would allow individuals to “exit” a shelter setting as “a bottleneck of the homeless problem in Lowell.” Creating more housing units and also creating more shelter space are the city’s current priorities in addressing homelessness.

Last Sunday the New York Times had a big article on the impact of homelessness on the longtime owners of a small sandwich shop in Phoenix, Arizona. Spouses Joe and Debbie Faillace have owned and operated Old Station Subs for nearly 40 years. Several years ago, a tent encampment sprung up on the sidewalks around the sub shop with devastating consequences for the business. The Faillaces both came across as sincerely sympathetic to the plight of those living in their midst, but they also faced the devastation of having their life’s work eroded away through no fault of their own. 

The article, “A Sandwich Shop, a Tent City and an American Crisis” is well-worth reading. I suspect that if the New York Times sent a reporter to Lowell, a similar story would emerge from any number of longtime local businesses. And to me, the article, which was also sympathetic to the homeless individuals and to the local officials trying to deal with the situation, made a pretty good case that, as the saying goes, “homelessness is a policy choice in America.”

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A report from the Division of Planning and Development reviewed a proposed ordinance for registering and maintaining vacant commercial and industrial properties, especially those in downtown. Its purpose is to reduce blight and safety hazards. If enacted, it will require a building owner to register with DPD and the Building Commissioner within 7 days of a property becoming vacant (although the draft letter to property owners included in the report says within 90 days). DPD will post a list of these vacant properties on a quarterly basis. This list will be the basis for referrals of potential tenants, grant programs for building improvements, and identifying other resources that might accelerate the re-occupancy of the building.

There will be an annual registration fee. The amount is not stated, but whatever it is, it will increase by 100% each year until the building is re-occupied. If unpaid, this fee will become a lien on the property.

The ordinance requires owners to maintain the property in accordance with all applicable sanitary, building and fire codes. Broken windows and doors must be fixed promptly, however, boarding them up is prohibited unless allowed by the Building Commissioner for a limited period of time. Violations will be punishable by a fine of $100 per day.

Accompanying the proposed ordinance is a DPD “summary of business incentives and support” which include tax incentives, grant programs, direct lending, and other technical assistance programs available to building owners.

This “carrot and stick” approach of imposing a punitive ordinance while simultaneously identifying means of helping building owners re-occupy vacant buildings seems like a good balance. The ordinance also seems modeled on the Vacant and Foreclosed Property ordinance that the city enacted in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse. That crisis left the city with many dozens of houses that had been foreclosed and were left vacant. These became crime magnets in their neighborhoods.

The Vacant and Foreclosed Building ordinance didn’t solve the problem but it did provide a useful tool in the city’s arsenal of responses to the problem. This proposed ordinance for vacant commercial buildings will hopefully serve a similar purpose, but it’s not going to solve the problem of downtown vacancies by itself.  

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A report from the city’s Energy Manager on Lowell’s efforts to reach the state-mandated 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and “net zero” by 2050, said that despite some of Lowell’s data being outdated or incomplete, the best estimate is that Lowell has had a reduction in emissions of 31% today as compared to levels in 1990. The areas of focus going forward are to increase the use of (1) solar energy, (2) electric vehicles, and (3) overall energy efficiency measures, both in city government and among residents and businesses.

Three members of the city’s Sustainability Council spoke on this report. They urged Councilors to act faster and to take every opportunity to reduce emissions. They highlighted the lack of solar power in the new high school project and current plans to replace several boilers in other schools with traditional boilers as opposed to more emissions-favorable alternatives as missed opportunities.  

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A response from the MIS Department on a Councilor Corey Robinson motion to increase the use of data metrics in city government received a mix response from Councilor Robinson. While he welcomed the report, he noted that he had made this motion last June and was disappointed to only be getting the response now. He pointed out that many councilors see this as an important issue and almost pleaded with the city administration to ask the Council for whatever resources are necessary to make it happen.

The primary focus of the report was on the establishment of a “formalized 311-based constituent services program.” Boston implemented such a program in 2015. It allows residents to connect with city services through landline telephones, via cellphones, or via a smart phone app.

My understanding is that a 311 system is much more comprehensive than just a cell phone app that makes it easier to report things like a missed trash pickup. It’s modeled on the 911 system which begins with a simple number that’s easy to remember. But the heart of the 911 system is the dispatch center and the people who staff it. All calls go into them and they are trained to deal with everything that comes in promptly and properly and to communicate to others (like police, fire or ambulance) what response is needed.

A proper 311 system would require a similar arrangement that would triage the mundane problems of everyday life and funnel them to the proper department for action. That requires adequate staffing, a high level of training, a commitment by all levels of city government to make the system work, and a physical place for the people staffing the 311 center to work (although if properly managed, much of that work could be done remotely).

Almost as important as the live operators taking incoming requests is the ability to collect all kinds of data in a centralized fashion. What are people calling about? How long did it take to respond to the call? Is there a pattern to the calls and complaints?

There’s a term that became popular about 10 years ago – “the internet of things” – which refers to all the things around us that have computer chips in them and are connected to the internet. They produce huge amounts of data that can be captured and analyzed.

The real value of a system like this can only be realized when there is a commitment from the top to use the data generated to drive operations. You can accumulate gigabytes of data but if no one ever pays attention to it, it does no one any good. In fact, it can be a net negative by adding to the burdens of an already-overtaxed IT department to create and operate data collections systems that no one ever pays attention to. But if it is used properly by management, a system like this can be an incredibly effective tool that increases efficiency.

However, implementing such a system is not easy. It is costly and requires a top down commitment to make it work. The MIS report on this motion projects that four new employees would be needed plus additional costs for various hardware and software. But I think that’s just for the MIS part. Who will answer the phones? Who will respond to the requests? If the plan is just to have a handful of MIS employees redirecting complaints that come in through a cell phone app to whatever department should be handling it, the system won’t work, or it won’t work the way it should.

Hopefully the Council sticks with this and keeps pushing to implement it. But I’m skeptical the implementation part will ever happen. It would require some revolutionary change to how city government has operated for decades, and the resistance to that will be too great to be overcome by anything that happens on the floor of the City Council chambers.

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A brief notice in the Council packet stated that the FY2024 budget will be presented to city councilors at their May 23, 2023, meeting. To ensure that Councilors see it before anyone else, the report specifies it will be “placed on Councilors’ desks that evening.” So the rest of us will have to wait a day at least to see it ourselves.

The report briefly identifies the challenges faced in this budget as:

• Increase in pension assessment for $1.2mil.

• Health insurance premium increases averaging 5.1% which is about $2mil.

• Increase in Charter School assessment for $2mil.

• Personnel cost increases per new collective bargaining agreements of $6mil.

• Increase in debt service of $450,000.

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Another report said that the real estate closing of the sale of Lelacheur Park from the city to UMass Building Authority is scheduled for April 4, 2023. The city will be paid $1mil for the ballpark.

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For those interested in the Greater Lowell Technical High School Committee, the Lowell City Council formally adopted changes to the method of electing GLTHS members. I do believe this process is already being followed, so this seemed more like a ratification of the current system than a startling new development. In any case, the election of members will occur at the biennial state election for a term of four years. “The election of members to the school committee shall, to the extent practicable, be staggered” which means that two of Lowell’s four school committee seats will be filled at every state election. Terms will commence on the January 1 next following the election. If a vacancy occurs, the replacement in Lowell is elected jointly by the City Council and the School Committee. Replacement of other reps varies from town to town.

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On richardhowe.com I’ve written several articles on the history of Lowell’s public water system. This weekend I’ve added another, Lowell Water Supply: Exploding Toilets, so please check that out.

The earlier articles were Christian Hill Reservoir and Lowell’s Water Supply which is about the still-standing reservoir in Centralville, and The Lowell Water Supply in 1890 which is about deadly bacteria in the pre-chlorine era of public water systems.