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Lowell Police Superintendent Ken Lavallee, who will retire at the end of this week, appeared at last night’s City Council meeting to bid farewell to the councilors. He thanked them for their support for him and for the Lowell Police Department through the years and urged them to continue making motions and holding hearings on public safety matters. Such council scrutiny, he says, create a positive sense of urgency for the command staff of the department and help set priorities. The Chief was also very complementary of support received from City Manager Lynch and others in City Hall. He singled out in particular the Law Department for its assistance to the police. The Chief then invited everyone to a small reception his family has organized for this Friday afternoon in the city council chambers and, while he did not announce his future plans, he said quite clearly “You’ll be seeing much more of me; I’m not going anywhere.”

Because City Manager Lynch was on vacation, he had taped a congratulatory message to Chief Lavallee that was then played in the council chambers. With the manager and Mayor Murphy not in attendance last evening, the meeting was expertly chaired by Council Vice Chair Joe Mendonca while Assistant City Manager Adam Baacke ably filled the manager’s chair (see photo below).

For the second straight week the Lowell City Council zipped through its meeting tonight, sticking to the agenda and not wandering too far afield on any particular issue (although the buzz on Facebook speculates that as the city election draws closer, the meetings will get lengthier). Old favorites made their inevitable appearance: double telephone poles, dog licenses and snow plowing among them.

The big issue tonight from my perspective was the sale of the old Butler School parcel on Gorham Street. That building, abandoned as a school many years ago, was insufficiently buttoned up to prevent fatal deterioration, so the only possible future use would be to tear down the structure and redevelop the parcel.

The city issued a request for proposals and received three. In a January 18, 2013 letter to the city council, City Manager Lynch conveyed the recommendation of an RFP Review Committee which met on October 31, November 8 and November 19 to review the three proposals. Two proposals were close. One by Mr. Chou Huynh offered $325,000 for the property and proposed building a single building containing a supermarket, a restaurant and a function hall. The other proposal, by J&K Realty Trust, offered $265,500 for the parcel on which it would construct two structures containing food service, office and retail uses. While the Huynh proposal would pay the city more up front and more in taxes going forward, the RFP Review Committee recommended the J&K proposal, mostly because it included the construction of an access road across the property that would connect a 16 acre parcel to the rear of the Butler site to Gorham Street. According to the committee, this adjacent parcel, known as 2 Prince Avenue, “represents one of Lowell’s greatest opportunities for additional industrial and commercial redevelopment.” The Huynh proposal included no such road.

Accompanying this explanatory letter on the council agenda was a proposed vote for the council to act on this evening. Several councilors decried a “lack of information” provided to aid them in their decision until the mayor pointed out that the explanatory letter had been in the packets received by all councilors at the start of the weekend. That cut short the “lack of information” councilors – perhaps they missed the report or maybe they forgot reading it.

Councilor Nuon did speak in favor of the Huynh proposal, suggesting that the vote be put off and the entire matter be sent to a subcommittee for further inquiry. Vesna did say that if the vote were to be taken this evening, he would grudgingly support the J&K proposal since he thought it essential that the project get underway. No one supported a subcommittee diversion so the vote was held and it passed by an 8 to 0 margin with Councilor Bill Martin voting “present” due to a legal conflict.

The meeting adjourned at 8:20 p.m. The sale of the Butler lot was a big deal. Once construction begins it will take 9 months to complete the project. Even more exciting is the prospect of this project jump starting a far larger project on the adjacent Prince parcel.

I was late getting home tonight so I missed the first 45 minutes of the Lowell City Council meeting and I was pulled away from the TV shortly after 9 pm, but the portion of the meeting I watched for nearly two hours was quite a change from what I witnessed just a week ago. Tonight’s discussion involved items that were actually on the agenda and the discussion on those issues was thorough but not belabored. It resembled a council meeting; not a parody of one.

When I first tuned in, flu shots were the topic. Earlier the Lowell Health Department had announced that it had exhausted its allocation of flu shots and councilors wanted the public to know that there were still plenty of flu shots available in Lowell at drugstores and doctors’ offices, just not at the city health department.

Next came a couple of relatively mundane issues – road repairs and dog licenses – which are both critically important municipal functions. Regarding dog licenses, the city is investing in some new software for the city clerk’s office to track information about dogs and licenses. During the discussion the manager suggested that the city was not getting all of the dog license fees to which he thought it entitled and that this new software might make collection efforts more efficient. As a Lowell dog owner for nearly three decades (four different dogs with some overlap), I have to concur with the manager. I knew dog license fees are due to the city each January and have mailed in my $10 check and self-addressed, stamped envelope every year for the past five years, but before that (i.e., for years beyond the statute of limitations) I pretty much neglected that requirement. My advice is to send out bills. It’s more likely that people will pay.

One item that prompted an interesting and (by tonight’s standards) an extensive discussion came from the Rules Subcommittee. In the aftermath of the former city clerk’s prosecution for theft more than a year ago, the council, the appointing authority of the clerk, the auditor and the city manager, expressly and tacitly acknowledged that it (the council) had failed in its supervisory responsibilities. To keep more active oversight over those three officials, the council voted to have eight “oversight” meetings during the non-summer months instead of regular council meetings, with each oversight meeting focused on one of the three council appointees.

Chaired by Councilor Ed Kennedy, the Rules Committee (which also included Bill Martin and Joe Mendonca) had at a recent meeting voted unanimously to continue with the oversight meetings but to have them occur 90 minutes before the start of the regular city council meeting rather than instead of the regular city council meeting. Some councilors weren’t initially sold on this proposal, arguing that since the council now had a Clerk/Auditor Oversight Subcommittee, there was no need to also have special meetings for those two positions. When Councilor Nuon commented that “You don’t want to wait until you have a problem to act” the move to cut back on oversight sputtered out and the council adopted the recommendation of the Rules Subcommittee on unanimous voice vote.

During this discussion, it was abundantly clear that not a few councilors are not fans of PowerPoint presentations at these meetings. Councilor Kennedy said he thought these meetings should be “free-wheeling affairs” at which councilors could raise any item they wished. While that comment nearly triggered in me a post-traumatic flashback to last week’s chaotic council meeting, it prompted the mayor to caution that such an approach would violate the state’s Open Meeting Law. At that point, other councilors spoke up, suggesting (properly, I believe) that any councilor can raise any item at one of these meetings so long as that councilor places that item on the meeting agenda in advance. Since the deadline for doing that is (I believe) 2 pm on the Friday before a Tuesday meeting, that seems like a reasonable approach.

At that point, other matters drew me away from the TV so I’ll have to catch the rest of the meeting once LTC posts it online. But from what I saw, this was a very different meeting – in a good way – than the one held a week ago.

Earlier this evening I visited a UMass Lowell intersession class on Community Psychology as I have for the past four years. It’s always a fun class because the dozen or so students, few of whom are ever from Lowell, have just attended their first-ever Lowell city council meeting the night before and always have plenty of questions about what they witnessed. Tonight was no different. The students were fascinated by the meeting but also sensed that because they were brand new to Lowell politics, they were unable to fully comprehend the many currents that were so obviously flowing beneath the surface of what was said and done on the floor of the council. The students looked to me to provide some context. I was happy to oblige. Exercising complete academic freedom, I held nothing back, sharing past incidents and conflicts and my analysis of how they influenced last night’s events. Not surprisingly, that took a long time since there was much going on last night.

After that discussion, a student question about the “representativeness” of the city council in light of our population launched us into a discussion of the power of voting. I returned to my favorite statistic – the disparity in voter turnout in city and state elections – and shared that if just one-tenth of all the people who voted in the just-past state election would vote in the city council race, it would completely change the dynamic of that contest. In the 2012 state election 33,583 votes were cast vs just 9,946 in the 2011 city election, a difference of 23,637 votes. Consider that in the council race, the fist place finisher received 5,305 votes and the ninth place finisher received 3,460. Adding 2,364 more voters (i.e., 10% of the 2012 overage) to the council race could certainly shake things up. That is not to say that it would result in wholesale changes to the council (although it might). What it would certainly mean is that the councilors who were elected, even if it were all nine incumbents, would be much more responsive to and considerate of the interests of these new voters. My message was: if you vote, politicians pay attention to you.

The UML students had already made a related observation. Several said that during the meeting they were repeatedly surprised to hear councilors cite individual phone calls or emails from constituents as reasons for voting for or against something. The students had been of the impression that a single voice would carry no weight in local affairs; what they saw last night showed them otherwise.

The other thing about the council meeting that surprised many of the students was the high level of friction that existed throughout the meeting. They arrived expecting a courtly and polite process but observed something very different. Interestingly, they found this to be a plus not a minus. The evident friction, they felt, added a sense of authenticity to the proceedings and they were impressed by the level of passion displayed my many of the meeting’s participants.

So that’s the feedback from the UML focus group that attended last night’s council meeting. The students tonight were great and hopefully I was able to help them better understand what happened at the council meeting. I know that’s what they did for me and for that I feel quite fortunate.

My level of civic engagement increased substantially this week. On Monday night, I attended a public meeting on the city’s draft Master Plan, Sustainable Lowell 2025, and last night I watched the city council meeting. Well, only the first two and a half hours of the city council meeting. After that my head hurt too much so I turned it off.

The contrast between the two events could not have been more striking. The Master Plan is an amazing document which, if used properly, will build upon the city’s past accomplishments and guide us to a successful, prosperous, inclusive and responsible future. The seventy or so people who attended that session, a mix of new and old, were clearly committed to the big picture for Lowell. The council, in contrast, repeatedly became bogged down in minutiae and narrow agendas, striving to protect the interests of individuals and favored constituencies at the expense of the city as a whole.

This is not a snap judgment on my part. It’s an opinion formed after watching a number of past council meetings and it leaves me concerned about the future of the city. In a number of ways this council reminds me of the group that was elected in 1991. During that term, the city’s finances spiraled into chaos as that era’s real estate bubble collapsed, yet the collective council’s most passionate and lasting concern was how many stop signs to place on Clark Road. The citizens of Lowell responded, electing six new councilors in November 1993 and changing the direction of the city in ways that still benefit us today.

Will history repeat itself twenty years later in the 2013 city election? Perhaps, but that depends on a number of factors. You can’t beat somebody with nobody, so for there to be a change in direction on the city council, qualified candidates who have a clear vision for the city’s future and who are committed to outwork the incumbents must enter the race. Another factor is voter turnout. In the last city council election, just 9,946 residents cast their votes. In the just-past presidential election, 33,583 citizens cast their ballots. If just a slight percentage of those 23,637 people who voted for president but not for council could be persuaded to come to the polls this November, the dynamic of the council race could change completely.

Ironically, the factor that does the most to protect the incumbents is the deft management of the city’s finances by Bernie Lynch. I say “ironically” because not a few councilors seem determined to hound Lynch out of the manager’s office with their incessant criticism yet they are the prime electoral beneficiaries of his financial management expertise. With the city’s finances so stable, there’s not the groundswell of broad public concern that arises in times of financial crisis as a key ingredient to widespread change on the city council.

For the past five years I’ve been a guest speaker at a UMass Lowell class on Community Psychology that is compressed into the inter-session period between the fall and spring semesters. The class typically has a dozen students, few of whom are from Lowell. I usually visit them the night after they attend a city council meeting. For two hours I answer their questions about what they saw at the meeting and try to put the issues into some type of context. The class was at last night’s meeting and so I’ll be their guest tonight. I’m anxious to hear their impressions of the council meeting and I’ll share them here in a general way tomorrow. But after what I saw last night, that won’t be the last thing I’ll be writing about this city council.