Lowell’s Plan E form of government has an inherent weakness: No single person has the final say. Although the Mayor chairs the meetings, serves on the School Committee, and represents the city ceremonially, the Mayor has no more power than any other Councilor. The City Manager is the chief executive, but the City Manager works for the City Council. To remain on the job, the City Manager must keep most of the City Council happy which means doing what Councilors “ask” regardless of the wisdom or propriety of those requests. The City Manager executes policy set by the council which means the eleven City Councilors must set the direction of the city.
Occasionally, the system has worked as intended when a majority of Councilors adopt shared priorities and have the discipline to allow the City Manager to implement those priorities. That requires individual Councilors to subjugate some of their personal priorities to the greater good of the majority. If every City Councilor just does his or her own thing, nothing gets done. That seems to be where we are at now.
The final three minutes of last Tuesday's Council meeting showed a Council not working together. Most meetings of this Council end in a mad scramble of “bundling” motions and abbreviated discussions to get through the agenda since the Council’s own rules require meetings to end by 10 p.m.
But with the every-other-week summer meeting schedule and no let up in the number of motions being filed, the Council has rolled the unfinished potion of one week’s agenda into Old Business on the next meeting’s agenda with a snowball effect. With three weeks since the last meeting, Councilors on Tuesday night abandoned any pretense of being able to get through the full agenda.
Here’s what happened: At 9:57 p.m., having just voted on Old Business motion number 15 (of 22) and with 15 City Manager responses to past Council motions and 13 new Council motions unaddressed (although some of these were taken out of order earlier but the majority remained), Councilor Dan Rourke moved to “refer all remaining motions to the City Manager’s office and accept the Motion Responses.” That motion passed. It was a valiant effort to get a big chunk of the agenda technically completed but it invited meeting watchers to ask how important any of this was if it could all be handled so quickly.
The critical moment was at 9:59 p.m. The microphones of both Mayor Chau and City Clerk Geary were off so it was hard to hear what they said. There was a long, silent delay then suddenly the roll of the council was being called. Here’s how that went:
· Councilor Robinson – YES
· Councilor Rourke – YES
· Councilor Scott – YES
· Councilor Yem – YES
· Mayor Chau – YES
· Councilor Drinkwater – YES
· Councilor Gitschier – YES
· Councilor Jenness – NO
· Councilor Leahy – NO
· Councilor Mercier – “What motion are we voting on?” To that, I believe Clerk Geary replied, “To go past 10 o’clock.” Councilor Mercier then voted NO
· Councilor Nuon – NO
The vote was seven YES and four NO, but a motion to suspend the council rules fails if two or more vote against it (and it might even be just one voting against it that defeats such a motion). In any case, the motion to continue the meeting past 10 p.m. failed and it was 10 o’clock so the meeting was over.
Councilor Gitschier then made a motion to take up all the unreached agenda items at a special meeting to be held next Tuesday (the Council is still on its every-other-week schedule) but Councilor Rourke said that since the motion to extend the meeting had failed, the meeting was over, and no further motions could be taken up. He added, “that should have been done before 10 o’clock.” Mayor Chau did a quick motion to adjourn and that was it. You can watch for yourself on LTC’s YouTube channel.
So why did Councilors Jenness, Leahy, Mercier and Nuon all vote to not extend the meeting beyond 10 p.m.? I’ve not talked to any of them, or heard any of them comment on it, but I’m quite sure it wasn’t because they were tired or because they had somewhere else to go. However, it would be nice to know why they voted as they did.
The Council is responsible for policing itself. It’s tough to do that when everyone wants to be courteous to colleagues and there’s an understandable “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” mentality, but when a Council consistently fails to complete the business on its agenda, it’s a sign of bigger problems and something needs to change.
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One item that was reached was a motion by Councilors Jenness and Nuon on homelessness. This motion was taken early because a resident had signed up to speak. That was the owner of the Purple Carrot Bakery Café at the corner of Merrimack and John. She described all the ways in which a handful of individuals disrupt her business. She was impassioned and passionate, explaining that in a prior career she worked in group homes and had professional training in de-escalation techniques and other strategies for dealing with disruptive people, so she is perhaps better equipped to deal with the disruptions than are other business owners, but even with that, what she constantly faces is driving her out of business.
The Council then discussed strategies for dealing with this problem and expanded the discussion to include people who stand alongside roads asking for money. This is a recurring issue for City Councils. For example, here’s what I wrote in my April 2, 2017, Lowell Week in Review column:
We haven’t heard much about “aggressive panhandling” in Lowell recently. Maybe that will come as the weather improves. There was talk of a kickoff for the “give your change for change” campaign, which urges residents to donate in a variety of ways to agencies that help the homeless rather than giving cash directly to panhandlers.
The city of Worcester recently received the bill for last year’s effort to counter “aggressive panhandling.” As reported on masslive.com by former Sun reporter Melissa Hanson, the city of Worcester must pay $519,489 in legal fees to the lawyers who represented three Worcester residents in challenging the legality of two panhandling ordinances enacted in 2015. Both were quickly declared unconstitutional by a U.S. District Court, and legal fees have now been awarded.
One of the ordinances made it unlawful to “beg, panhandle or solicit in an aggressive manner” while the other prohibited hanging out on a traffic island or roadway (which is where many panhandlers position themselves). In awarding the fees, Judge Timothy Hillman found that the litigation “was an important case which raised and decided important issues of public concern.”
Hopefully Lowell sticks to attacking the underlying causes of panhandling and avoids the expensive Constitutional minefield of attacking panhandling itself.
How to deal with homelessness and panhandling is one of the most complicated tasks a city can undertake. The impulse to proclaim simple solutions is great, the problem is a simple solution is no solution at all and usually exacerbates the problem. There are many things that can be done and should be done. People in city government know what those things are but they must be given the resources and the latitude to do them.
My recollection of the meeting was that quite a bit of time early on was taken up by time devoted to mayor’s business. It seemed to me that close to an hour was spent on this section of the agenda. A vast chunk of the remaining time was devoted to trash pickup and homeless issues. Hmm?
At last Tuesdays City Council meeting, the Mayor asked for a motion to go past the 10 pm Rule 5.
A motion was made to go past the Rule 5, not a motion to suspend the rules. To pass a motion as put forth, it requires a majority vote, since it was never made as a suspension of the rules.
If a suspension of the rules is asked for as spelled out in rule 32, before any role call, if two Councilors object, then the suspension of the rules can not be put forth and the meeting is over.
If there is a role call on the suspension of the rules, then it takes 2/3 to defeat the suspension of the rules.
There was never a motion to suspend the rules on the floor, what was on the floor was a motion to go past the 10pm rule 5. Under any regular motion, majority is the rule and 7-4 was a majority.