October 16, 2022
Tuesday night’s city council meeting may have been the shortest of the year time-wise. It finished at 8 p.m. which is two hours earlier than most meetings have concluded this year. (This is an observation; not a complaint). There were four motion responses and six new motions. The City Manager did not have any major reports on the agenda and it seemed that few if any city department heads were present (they usually fill the spectator portion of the council chamber). As the meeting concluded, Mayor Sokhary Chau said with reference to the brevity of the meeting, “We should have more meetings after Monday holidays” so perhaps that had something to do with it.
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One of the motion responses provided an update on the MassDOT Lowell Connector project in reply to a Councilor Kim Scott motion. I wrote about this last week but my focus was on the Thorndike Street intersection with the Connector and did not include the latest plans for the end of the Connector at Gorham Street.
The Gorham Street plan will create a “roundabout” (also known as a traffic circle or rotary) at the end of the Connector. I had a hard time envisioning that, but there is a plan available on the city website that shows the proposed layout. I’ll try to translate that graphic design into text for this newsletter. To orient us, the Connector inbound is heading east, outbound is heading west. Gorham Street towards downtown is northbound; Gorham Street towards South Lowell is southbound.
Let’s start with coming inbound on the Connector. Now, there are two lanes that end in a T-shaped intersection with Gorham Street. A traffic signal controls the flow of vehicles on both roads. Under the new plan, the two incoming lanes of the Connector will flow into a newly constructed traffic circle which is two lanes wide. Both lanes will loop around and become Gorham Street northbound although the outer lane will also include an exit that will become Gorham Street southbound. (A stretch of Gorham Street will be a portion of the traffic circle, not something separate).
If you are traveling inbound (north) on Gorham Street towards downtown, the road will bend to the left where you will have a Yield sign before joining the traffic circle. That means the two lanes coming off the Connector which will be approaching from your left will have the right of way and you’ll have to wait until there’s an opening before getting onto the traffic circle and then continuing north on Gorham Street. Notably, Gorham Street inbound beyond that point will be widened slightly and will have two clearly marked inbound lanes rather than the current one lane. The two lanes will continue past Keene, Walnut, Auburn, and Elm Streets and will finally pinch down to a single inbound lane just beyond the Superior Courthouse.
Outbound traffic on Gorham Street coming from downtown will be in a single lane as it is now, however, all traffic will curve to the right and will encounter a Yield sign before entering the traffic circle. If you are going outbound on the Connector, you will immediately exit the traffic circle onto the one outbound lane of the connector. (The plan shows a second outbound Connector lane forming a short distance from the traffic circle). However, if you wish to continue outbound on Gorham Street, you will loop around the traffic circle, cross the two inbound Connector lanes which are controlled by a Yield sign, and then exit the traffic circle onto the continuation of Gorham Street.
A MassDOT study predicts that a traffic circle would “greatly [reduce] the existing congestion issues at the intersection and that the cost would be $1.4mil. The study identifies three problems with the existing configuration: (1) the abrupt termination of the highway at Gorham Street; (2) the need for two lanes coming from the highway to merge into a single northbound lane of Gorham Street in the middle of the intersection; and (3) traffic backups to the Gorham St/Connector interchange caused by backups from the traffic light at Gorham and Elm Streets.
According to the DPD memo given to the council, this is still in the planning phase with a public hearing expected to be held sometime next summer.
The same memo also dismissed Councilor Scott’s related motion about transforming the Connector from a highway to an at-grade boulevard due to “prohibitive geometric, financial and environmental constraints,” stating “MassDOT indicated that it is not feasible from a design standpoint nor is the funding available to pursue a project of this scale.” Councilor Scott pushed back on this answer and asked the City Manager to continue exploring ways this might get done.
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Best wishes to City Solicitor Christine O’Connor who, according to the Eagle Tribune newspaper, will leave Lowell next month to take the solicitor’s position in North Andover. A graduate of Boston College and Suffolk University Law School, O’Connor began working in the Lowell solicitor’s office in 1995, was promoted to first assistant solicitor in 2002, and became solicitor in 2004. The article says O’Connor will begin work in North Andover in mid-November.
Christine O’Connor is the latest Lowell department head to leave city employment since this new city council came into office last January. Christine McCall recently left the position of Assistant City Manager/DPD Director for a position in the private sector; in April, Christine Clancy left the position of Public Works Commissioner in Lowell for a similar job in Chelmsford; also in April, Eric Slagle left as Lowell’s director of Developmental Services to become Townsend town administrator; at the same time, DEI officer Ferdousi Faruque resigned after just four months in the job; and, of course, the council rejected Eileen Donoghue’s request for a one year extension of her contract as city manager and opted to hire Tom Golden to replace her.
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The November 8, 2022, state election is fast approaching. There should be a period of in person early voting but that page of the city’s website only shows information for the already-past September 6, 2022, primary. The Secretary of State’s elections page has quite a bit of information about voting by mail. If you haven’t already requested a mail-in ballot, there is still time to do so but don’t wait too long.
Besides the various offices that are on the ballot this year, there are also four ballot questions. With the prevalence of early voting and vote-by-mail growing, today seemed like a good time to review those questions:
Question 1 – Additional Tax on income over one million dollars
A YES vote would amend the state constitution to impose an additional 4% state income tax on that portion of annual taxable income that exceeds $1 million. It also provides that revenue raised by this increase would be used for public education and for transportation infrastructure, all subject to appropriation by the legislature. This would go into effect for the tax year beginning January 1, 2023, and would raise approximately $1.2 billion per year.
Question 2 – Regulation of Dental Insurance
A YES vote would require insurers that offer dental benefits to spend at least 83% of the premiums collected on actual dental services as opposed to administrative costs.
Question 3 – Expanded availability of liquor licenses
A YES vote would increase the number of liquor licenses for off-premises consumption that a single individual or company can own and would prohibit the use of self-checkout stations in entities with such licenses.
Question 4 – Eligibility for Driver’s Licenses
A YES vote would keep in place a law already passed by the state legislature that would allow Massachusetts residents who cannot provide proof of lawful presence in the United States to obtain a driver’s license if they meet all other requirements. (The type of license issued to such individuals would not be a REAL ID of the type needed to board a commercial aircraft).
I’m a pretty solid YES on questions 1 (income tax) and 4 (driver’s licenses) but am still up in the air on 2 (dental insurance) and 3 (liquor licenses). At first glance, both seem desirable – spend more of your dental insurance premium on patient care and allow retailers to sell alcohol in more locations, but sometimes the objectives of these questions aren’t what they seem.
Regarding Question 2 (dental insurance), spending more of the premiums paid on actual dental care seems like an easy Yes, but would that requirement make it unprofitable for insurers to offer dental coverage? That’s the argument of the NO side. On something like this, I try to find out who is paying for the advertising for each side. That info is often opaque but if you dig into it and identify who stands to benefit from one outcome or the other, it helps me decide how to vote.
As for Question 3 (additional liquor licenses), sure, it would be convenient if I could pick up a six pack of beer or a bottle of wine when I shopped for groceries as you can do in New Hampshire or in most other places. Would this allow Market Basket and Hannaford to sell adult beverages in their local stores? That sounds OK. But I’ve also become an enthusiastic user of self-checkout at the grocery store. I found myself in Burlington a few weeks ago and stopped at Wegmans. Among other things, I picked up a six pack of beer and used the self-checkout kiosk, but when I scanned the beer, lights began flashing and the system froze until an employee came over and looked at my ID. Only then did he enter the code that allowed me to continue. That seemed like a pretty good way to do it but a Yes on this question would ban the use of self-checkouts so maybe this isn’t such a good approach. Like my approach on the dental insurance questions, I’ll dig into who is paying for the advocacy on either side of this issue before I decide how I’ll vote.
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In the recently enacted FY2023 Massachusetts state budget, State Senator Ed Kennedy inserted language that will name the relatively new Lowell Justice Center the Cornelius F. Kiernan Judicial Center. Kiernan was a longtime state representative from the Acre neighborhood in Lowell who was appointed a district court judge in 1974 after 26 years in the legislature. Kiernan died in 1996 at age 78.
There was also language in the same budget to name the law library in the Justice Center for Daniel P. Leahy, a longtime Lowell lawyer who served four years as a state senator and four years as a city councilor before being appointed a clerk magistrate at the Charlestown District Court. Leahy died in 2016.
For more information about Kiernan and Leahy, please check out my post on richardhowe.com
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Thanks to the 105 people who showed up for yesterday’s walking tour of Lowell Cemetery. For many years, I’ve led such tours each spring and fall, however, the pandemic put that on pause until yesterday. The same tour will be repeated today at 10am starting at the Knapp Avenue entrance, so if you’re reading this early and are free later this morning, please join us for this 90 minute walk through historic Lowell Cemetery.