May 11, 2025

The most important portion of Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting emerged from an innocuous agenda item: The City Manager notifying the council that a member of one of the city’s many volunteer-staffed boards had resigned. The board involved was the city’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB) Committee and the departing member was Mona Tyree.

Ms. Tyree was present at the meeting and was allowed to speak and explain why she resigned. She said she joined the committee when it was first created last June, and attended its first two meetings, but there have been no meetings since, and it seemed that nothing was being done.

When pressed by city councilors, City Manager Tom Golden essentially said that given the barrage of anti-DEI executive orders issued by President Trump, the city has had to “scrub” any mention of DEI from the many grant applications it submits for federal funding. Golden made it clear that because the city is so dependent on federal funding that he sees protecting the flow of federal money to the city as a priority. He also said that other communities that have maintained the status quo on DEI activities have had funding requests rejected by the federal government out of hand. Presumably Lowell’s DEIB committee is a casualty of this.

In his first week in office, President Trump issued a series of executive orders targeting diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the public and private sectors. Among other things, the executive orders require recipients of federal funds to certify that they do not operate any programs promoting DEI. I assume this is what Golden refers to.

Back on February 6, 2024, the city council voted unanimously to create the DEIB Committee. On March 13, 2024, the city posted an invitation to fill the eleven newly created positions on the committee which would consist of the city’s Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer; the Lowell Police Department DEI liaison; two Lowell High students; a representative from the Chamber of Commerce; four members from the non-profit community; and two associate members appointed by the City Manager. The committee was to meet on the third Wednesday of each month.

The duties of the committee were as follows:

• Advise the City Manager on the diversity, equity, and inclusion function of the city, including, making recommendations on programs that promote diversity within the city.

• Review the existing policies, procedures, services, and activities of any city department, board, commission, or agency and make recommendations to the City Manager on ways to improve regulations related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

• Encourage, promote, and monitor practices in the city to ensure that all individuals enjoy equal protection of the law, equal access to all public services and the full enjoyment and exercise of their civil rights.

• Submit annually to the City Manager, to be conveyed to the Mayor and City Council, a report stating the undertakings if the Committee, its accomplishments, conclusions, and recommendations concerning the status of diversity, equity, and inclusion related issues in Lowell.

During Tuesday’s meeting, Golden asserted that “good things” have been happening within the city workforce in these areas, but “we have fallen short with the public.” He said he failed to bring the DEIB Committee together and failed to “talk to our community.” While saying he offered no excuses, he said, “The ground is shifting underneath you. In our grant applications we must scrub things, otherwise we’d be immediately denied. We’re so reliant on federal grants.”

In their comments, several councilors seemed clueless as to the larger implications of what’s happening; others, like City Manager Golden, tip-toed around the issue; though Councilor Kim Scott seemed to get it, saying “this is disturbing and requires a larger discussion about these mandates and how they have changed how we’re doing business.”

Here's the problem: If, in 2024, you say you are committed to diversity, equity and inclusion in Lowell, but then in 2025, you erase any mention of diversity, equity and inclusion to keep your federal funds flowing, you never really were committed to DEI in the first place.

I sympathize with City Manager Golden. I don’t know the dollar amount of federal funds coming to Lowell, but I assume it’s substantial and that losing that money would have a devastating effect. But remaining silent about what’s going on, as the city has done thus far, is the wrong approach. There should be a public reckoning on the anti-DEI mandates from Washington that includes identifying the number and amount of federal grants at risk and a further explanation of how city government has navigated this minefield so far. Trying to paper over the problem, to pretend it doesn’t exist, to hope that by remaining silent the bully won’t pick on you is the wrong approach.

Lowell can’t be alone in this dilemma. Most communities in Massachusetts have DEI policies and receive federal funds. How are they handling this? When everyone remains silent, you feel weak and alone. When everyone joins together to protest, there’s strength in numbers. When you stand up to a bully, the bully will back down. The city of Lowell acting on its own might not change things; but perhaps a coalition of dozens of cities and towns protesting together would bring much-needed attention to what’s going on.

It should go without saying that the American Dream has not been equally available to all. Programs that increase diversity, equity and inclusion are strategies to equalize opportunities for groups of people who have been unfairly disadvantaged. Supporting DEI is being on the right side of history, something no executive order from Washington can change.

Now that this is out in the open in Lowell, it’s time for the city council to show some leadership on this issue.

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Also on Tuesday, the council was notified that the UMass Lowell Inn & Conference Center (ICC), which has been used most recently by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as temporary housing for refugees, will be fully vacant by the end of this year. City Manager Golden explained that the building is owned by the University of Massachusetts Building Authority (UMBA) which has the final say on the future use of the building, but that UMass Lowell has “a lot of interest in its use.” Golden said the city has talked frequently with the state about the building and there have been “a lot of great ideas.” While not disclosing any specifics, Golden indicated that between the ICC and (presumably) the neighboring Lowell District Court site, there is the potential for “hundreds of housing units.”

The ICC began life as a 251-room Hilton Hotel which opened in 1985 to rave reviews. The developer of the hotel had initially balked at the idea of a hotel in downtown Lowell, claiming it was not viable, but the city, aided by former US Senator Paul Tsongas, stepped in and persuaded Lowell-based computer maker Wang which was constructing its international training center next to the proposed hotel site, to guarantee occupancy of a majority of the hotel rooms year round to house students at the training center (which is now Middlesex Community College’s Cowan Building). With that assurance plus the city’s promise to build a 1000 space parking garage (today’s Lower Locks Parking Garage) and to reconfigure the road network from the end of the Lowell Connector to the hotel, the developer proceeded with the project.

Unfortunately, a downturn in high tech caused Wang to file bankruptcy and abandon its training center. The occupancy rate of the hotel never recovered. Despite attempts to remake it as a Sheraton and then a Doubletree, it never worked as a hotel. In 2010, the University of Massachusetts Lowell stepped in and purchased the building (through the UMass Building Authority) to use as a dormitory and function center. For more than 10 years, the building did well in that capacity but then budget cuts caused UMass Lowell to retrench and vacate the building. Most recently, the state leased the building from UMBA to house refugees, but as we learned on Tuesday night, that use will soon come to an end and the building will enter its next chapter.

Given the scale of the building and the way it dominates the surrounding area, finding a productive use that complements the rest of downtown is vital to the well-being of the city.

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Tuesday’s meeting also featured a presentation from the city’s parking department. The PowerPoint presentation is available online, but the discussion following the presentation highlighted the balance that must be struck between enforcing the parking regulations as a source of revenue (more tickets mean more money to the city) with not allowing that enforcement to be a disincentive for visitors to come to downtown.

The presentation was more operation-focused and made no mention of the fiscal condition of the parking enterprise fund which has operated at a loss for the past few years.

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City Manager Golden alerted the council that he will request a 2.5 percent tax increase for the coming fiscal year but even with that, the amount of cash granted to the Lowell Public Schools will be $4 million less than the school department says that it needs. According to a Lowell Sun article on Friday, the $4 million shortfall will cause 53 employees to be laid off. (“Lowell budget: Tax increase of 2.5%; $4M cuts to schools; 53 PLS cuts.”) Golden’s letter to the council on this matter is available online.

School funding has long been a contentious issue in Lowell pitting the school committee versus the city manager and the council. The mammoth flow of Covid-related federal funding to the city in recent years temporarily relieved that tension but now the Covid money is gone and we’re back to reality. I won’t get into that here but will return to this topic in a future newsletter once the council’s every-other-week summer meeting schedule commences.

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There was some great news on the historic preservation front. Both the Lowell Sun and the Boston Globe reported this week that country music superstar Zach Bryan has purchased the former St. Jean Baptiste Church on upper Merrimack Street for use as the Jack Kerouac Center.

The sale took place a week ago with the deed being recorded on April 29, 2025. That deed conveyed the former church from Merrimack Street Real Estate Development Corporation (which purchased the building from the Archdiocese of Boston in 2008) to BASP MA LLC, a Delaware limited liability corporation doing business in California. The amount paid was $3.4 million. According to the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s corporation database, the “manager” (essentially the president of an LLC) is Zachary L. Bryan. For the singer to not only put up the money but to also be directly involved in the entity that now owns the building is amazing.

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This week on richardhowe.com:

New poems from Bill O’Connell (“The geometry of baseball”) and Jim Provencher (“Voyages”).

Louise Peloqiun translated articles from L’Etoile, Lowell’s French language newspaper on the city council dealing with housing, parking and roadwork back in 1924.

I posted a chapter from John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1845 book about Lowell in which the famous poet shares observations about the city’s Irish and English immigrants (“The heart of the stranger”).

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Lowell Cemetery tours this spring:

On Sunday, May 18, 2025, at 10 am, I’ll lead a Memorial Day themed tour that highlights some of the military veterans buried in the cemetery.

On Saturday June 7, 2025, and again on Sunday June 8, 2025, both at 10 am, I’ll lead the traditional Lowell Cemetery spring tour (same tour on both days).

All three tours will begin inside the Lawrence Street Gate (1020 Lawrence Street, Lowell, for your GPS). Plenty of parking is available within the cemetery. The tours are free and require no advance registration. They last 90 minutes and include a moderate amount of walking. The tours will be held rain or shine (but not in thunderstorms or severe downpours). Further information is available on the Lowell Cemetery website.