Left In Lowell

Tonight the Lowell City Council at its regularly scheduled meeting extended the contract of City Manager Bernie Lynch another two years through July 2010. The discussion focused on creating stability for the City as well as rewarding the City Manger for a job well done.

All of the CCs praised the Manager for his efforts, work ethic and success. However, the vote was 6-3; two voted against because they do not agree in giving contracts to a City Manager and one voted against because he did not agree with an extension.

Congratulations CM Lynch and keep up the good work! (more…)

Seriously.

I just saw an interesting exchange on tonight’s CC meeting. I think I saw CC RM give a legal opinion about whether disclosing a document would adversely effect the city’s (and taxpayers’) legal position.

From what I gather, she wants to make public a legal opinion document (you know the one… the one Sun editor Jim Campanini is suing the city for… the one that was, from what I understand, obtained for the purposes of future legal actions for the City… she calls it an audit… but hey, we come from a different generation) that necessitated attorney-client privilege and required an executive session to discuss. The advice that the CC got from counsel, and that everyone apparently agreed to and the conclusion of the executive session, was that for the sake of preserving the taxpayers’ legal interest in upcoming litigation (an admittedly slow process) that the report should remain private. This was the advice of general counsel… but now counsel Rita has changed her mind. I’m not aware of any legal qualification she has to have so publicly dissented from the advice of the city’s law department. I mean, of course she is entitled to her opinion, but to dissent from what your lawyer says is ill advised when its only your own neck on the line, but all us taxpayers are affected.

She doesn’t see any good legal reason to withhold the document from the public (after having been advised to by counsel). Since she was advised by a lawyer that the document should be withheld, I can only conclude that she thinks she knows law better than a lawyer.

Seriously though, if she continues and this gets ruined, do we taxpayers have a remedy? Can we send her a bill?

And BTW… Given that CC BC was in on the motion, I have to conclude he is just as culpable. I hope if either of them ever get into real legal trouble they are at least smart enough to hire, and listen to, a real lawyer.

This is huge. As John says, someone leaked this preliminary preview of this internal Pentagon report very deliberately. Newsweek says:

NEWSWEEK has learned that a separate internal report being prepared by a Pentagon working group will “differ substantially” from Petraeus’s recommendations, according to an official who is privy to the ongoing discussions but would speak about them only on condition of anonymity. An early version of the report, which is currently being drafted and is expected to be completed by the beginning of next year, will “recommend a very rapid reduction in American forces: as much as two-thirds of the existing force very quickly, while keeping the remainder there.” The strategy will involve unwinding the still large U.S. presence in big forward operation bases and putting smaller teams in outposts. “There is interest at senior levels [of the Pentagon] in getting alternative views” to Petraeus, the official said. Among others, Centcom commander Admiral William Fallon is known to want to draw down faster than Petraeus.

It looks like there’s a quiet, legitimate mutiny of policy in the Pentagon regarding the surge and Iraq. This, more than anything else, could signal the end of Bush’s war.

Couple that with this little tidbit - Petraeus can’t seem to bring himself to honestly answer the question, “does the surge strategy make America safer?” Hopefully Patraeus’ testimony unravels quickly. By lying to us for the sake of Bush’s propaganda scheme, he’s hurting America.

“As for CM applications, the desire to have a professional will likely require a substantial increase in salary, a contract, or some combination of both-waittilnextyr, April 30, 2006 on LiL

This comment was posted by wait… 2 months before the City Council even began to interview the candidates. It is simple, if you want a career public administrator, you need a contract.

As Lynne mentioned in the previous post, tonight the City Council will take up a vote to extend City Manager’s Bernie Lynch’s contract for another two years. If you followed the discussion during the City Council meeting and watched the Personnel Sub-Committee meeting last night, I think the motion will have the necessary majority to pass.

And if you did not watch last night’s meeting, CM Lynch made a Power Point Presentation, “First Year Accomplishments and Future Goals. (It is on the City’s web site). This was in response to a City Council motion asking him to “meet with the Council regarding his Goal and Objectives pursuant to his contract.”

As CC Eileen Donoghue stated, there is a lot of incorrect information floating around the hysteria that has been generated regarding this issue.

I am sure that tonight, she, Mayor Bill Martin, CCs Jim Milinazzo and Kevin Broderick will reiterate what they said last night. We can than judge if other contracts were extended by this CC; yes, they did. The previous CM requested that a contract that had 2 years remaining on it be extended for another 5 years. Guess what, this current CC voted 9-0. (more…)

Just some “quick hits” as Charley at BMG calls them:

Maybe I’m biased a little, but I just really loved this post by Tony. All right, I’m totally biased!
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The ZBA approved, in what was the final decision on the matter, the Target (pronounced “Tarzhay,” for those who don’t know) on Plain Street, which now goes ahead full steam. Mmmm…commercial taxpayers. Hey, that’s my neighborhood! Does that mean we’ll get a light on Plain for getting off the Connector? I hate waiting for traffic there. ;-P
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Tonight’s Council meeting should be interesting and full of melodrama…Lynch’s contract extension is up for debate. Says the article by Mike LeFleur: “Members of the council’s personnel subcommittee last night voted 2-1 to send the issue to the full council for its consideration tonight, during a meeting scheduled to start at 6:30 p.m. in the council chamber at City Hall.” Guess who dissented? No really, just one guess!
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Dick does that whole fact-checking thing again…Yes, Eileen did get proportionately as many votes as she did in the last City Council election. Or does the Lowell Rumor Mill (LRM?) work with only fuzzy math? In fact:

To put Donoghue’s electoral accomplishment in context, I looked at five other races in which a sitting councilor or school committee member ran for higher office and compared the candidate’s vote totals and percentages in the two races. No one matched Donoghue’s accomplishment. The only one who came close was Steve Panagiotakos. In the 1991 school committee election, Panagiotakos received the votes of 8422 of the 16356 participants in that election (51% of the vote). The following year, Steve ran for state representative, defeating Susan Rourke. In that election, Panagiotakos received 3657 of the 6324 votes cast in the race for 58%. Of all the races I examined, only Donoghue and Panagiotakos received a higher percentage of votes in the vote-for-one race than they did in the vote-for-nine (or six in the case of the school committee).

Of course, if not for the radio caller that Dick mentioned, he probably wouldn’t have pulled up all these great numbers and put them together. (I’ll say it again…if you are not reading Dick’s blog on a daily basis, you are truly missing out. I may not link to it all the time, but it’s a must-read for any Lowell politico.)
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And hey, it’s freaking pouring out again. What’s with going over a month with nary a drop and then being deluged? My rain barrel is already full, Mother Nature, you can stop any time now.

Margaret, at Jackie Doherty’s blog, puts to rest all those “but we don’t hire enough from Lowell” whines about the school department. She points to Jackie’s op-ed in the Lowell Sun (permalink here), which cites a report from the superintendent.

Says Jackie:

Finally, we can put to rest the unfounded accusations that the Lowell School District does not promote from within or hire residents for key jobs in our schools. At last week’s School Committee meeting, the superintendent presented a “Personnel Report on Hiring Practices” that showed 66 percent of all those hired for administrative positions over the last seven years have been promoted from within, 33 percent of the new hires live in Lowell, and 38 percent were raised here.

The report was in response to a motion I made at the Aug. 16 School Committee meeting to get the facts about the district’s hiring practices once and for all. Tired of listening to rumors on local radio shows or more recently, reading accusations from a School Committee challenger (See Sun story Aug. 1), I felt it was time to set the record straight with facts, as well as get information important to know going forward.

No surprise to me that the “Lowell rumor mill” once again got everything completely bass-ackwards.

A.J. on AMERICAblog has it exactly right:

A day robbed of its rightful meaning

It’s impossible to appropriately comment on a day like today.

One wants to think about this day differently, somehow, despite the fact that its impact and effects confront us endlessly. One wants to be able to think about this date, this anniversary, without partisan overtones and instead with recognition of the shared experience. The collective response to an appalling attack had such potential, such meaning for who we are as individuals and as a nation.

Today it’s an arrow in political quivers.

Pain and suffering can beget pain and suffering, even when so many of us work to make it otherwise.

So we work harder, and do more, and maintain the notion that this is a day for all Americans. One to be remembered simply for loss, even in the midst of all other factors. Just loss.

The words “September the 11th” have been washed of any meaning of simple remembrance of those lost, so often has it been used, abused, and substituted for justification in cynical political acts like a war we were lied into or civil liberties we are told we have to give away. In speeches for six years, we have been told that September the 11th changed everything. It certainly has. It has taken a national tragedy and made it hard to see for what it is at its core - human pain and suffering and the center of a national communal outpouring of grief, togetherness, and yes, strength.

September the 11th should have raised the United States to its greatest hour. Instead, we are forced now to add mourning for our own additional dead, and vaguely aware of so many more deaths…families like ours, in another country across a great ocean, whose losses are largely uncounted by the American public. Suffering we have perpetrated on the world, yet again.

It didn’t have to be this way. Today, let’s try to remember September the 11th the way we should, and not the way they want us to…as a day the world stood still, the towers came crashing down, and we held hands, and hugged…and cried.

The latest and greatest snow job by the Bush administration (haven’t we heard this all before?) gets some push back. Here’s some of it:

Anbar is a fluke - it was going to happen (at least on some level) with or without the surge. The Sunni leaders were tired of Al Quada in Iraq, and sure, it helped having more US troops there to help clear them out, but Anbar is not necessarily repeatable everywhere. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to help give moderates a space to breath and get the extremists out, but it’s certainly no result of the surge. What’s more, yesterday, Petraeus mislead Congress about it.

Violence against US troops went down (a bit). But against Iraqi civilians and Iraqi security, it’s not changing so much.

Iraqis themselves don’t think the surge is doing all that much for them. Given the chart linked above, it’s no wonder why.

Petraeus claims that due to progress (if it continues) he can withdraw the surge troops by next summer. No mention that we have no choice but to withdraw the troops, due to the fact the armed forces have been broken by this war of choice.

The progress is bullshit anyway.

Senator Harry Reid has some facts of his own released on his site. Some highlights:

General Petraeus Claimed the Pentagon’s Methodology for Tracking Sectarian Killings Was Reviewed By Two US Intelligence Agencies, But Did Not Name Them. […]

However, U.S. Intelligence Officials Questioned Pentagon’s Methods of Tracking Violence in Iraq. “The intelligence community has its own problems with military calculations. Intelligence analysts computing aggregate levels of violence against civilians for the NIE puzzled over how the military designated attacks as combat, sectarian or criminal, according to one senior intelligence official in Washington. ‘If a bullet went through the back of the head, it’s sectarian,’ the official said. ‘If it went through the front, it’s criminal.’” [Washington Post, 9/6/07]

A Military Spokesman Admitted It Did Not Track Shiite-on-Shiite or Sunni-on-Sunni Violence. “According to a spokesman for the Baghdad headquarters of the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I), those attacks are not included in the military’s statistics. ‘Given a lack of capability to accurately track Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence, except in certain instances,’ the spokesman said, ‘we do not track this data to any significant degree.’” [Washington Post, 9/6/07]

And, the GAO Found Claims of Decreased Sectarian Violence Could Not Be Verified. “On trends in sectarian violence, we could not determine if sectarian violence had declined since the start of the Baghdad Security Plan. The administration’s July 2007 report stated that MNF-I trend data demonstrated a decrease in sectarian violence since the start of the Baghdad Security Plan in mid-February 2007. The report acknowledged that precise measurements vary, and that it was too early to determine if the decrease would be sustainable.” [GAO Report: Securing, Stabilizing and Rebuilding Iraq, September 2007]

General Petraeus Claimed the Number of Car Bombings Has Come Down. […]

However, The Military Does Not Include Car Bombings in Sectarian Violence Statistics. “According to U.S. military figures, an average of 1,000 Iraqis have died each month since March in sectarian violence. That compares with about 1,200 a month at the start of the security plan, the military said in an e-mailed response to queries. This does not include deaths from car bombings, which the military said have numbered more than 2,600 this year.” [LA Times, 9/4/07 ]

And, The Number of Car Bombings In Iraq Was Five Percent Higher in July 2007 than in December 2006. The number of car bombings in July actually was 5 percent higher than the number recorded last December, according to statistics given to the McClatchy news organization, and the number of civilians killed in explosions is about the same. [McClatchy Newspapers, 8/15/07]

Reid also notes that the goalposts (yet again) have moved for the length of deployment.

As I said, we’ve heard it all before - and this time is no different. This post has not even gone into the total, utter lack of progress on the political side of things, which has been a disaster.

ThinkProgress has a quote from CBS’s Bob Schieffer:

CBS Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer said this morning that one of the lessons we learned from Vietnam “is that we were asking the wrong question” to our generals. “When we have to ask, are we winning? we’re probably losing. Victory is always obvious,” he said.

Let me preempt that question to General Petraeus. We haven’t lost this war, but we’re not winning it. We’re hanging on. Victory would be obvious. Iraqi families would be strolling the streets of Baghdad, and Osama bin Laden would be walking out of a cave somewhere with his hands up.

Instead of that question, let’s hope the general will be asked what we so often forgot during Vietnam: Is this worth the cost in lives and money?

Two weeks ago, the City announced that Trinity Financial of Boston, MA has been chosen as the Master Developer for the http://www.hamiltoncanal.com/ Hamilton Canal District. The City web site has extensive information and if you want additional details, please check it out.

There is also a neat interactive map for those of you who want a quick review.

The Hamilton Canal District will reinvent 15 acres of vacant and underutilized land as a new vibrant mixed-use neighborhood connecting Lowell’s downtown to its Commuter Rail station. The project is an innovative public-private partnership between the City of Lowell and Trinity Financial. The $500 million, 2 million square foot project will include a substantial commercial component, 500-1000 new housing units, a new Judicial Center housing the Lowell Trial Courts, and potentially the new U. Mass/Lowell Nanotechnology Center.

I wanted to highlight another Mass blogger’s opposition to casino gambling in Massachusetts, because he goes into depth on other reasons to oppose the measure, such as the social cost, than I did in my post. David Eisenthal is a studied, serious writer and I recommend a read. A sample:

Another immediate cost of casino gambling is the potential growth of gambling addiction. Gamblers Anonymous estimates that one in twenty gamblers becomes a problem gambler. If it is true, as Rep. Dan Bosley wrote in May, that most casino customers come from within a 50 mile radius, then casinos in Middleborough and Palmer would serve mostly Massachusetts customers. Whatever problem gambling is already present within Massachusetts would surely be worsened by the introduction of casinos.
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The long-term social costs of introducing casino gambling are even more compelling than the short-term ones. What kind of place do we want Massachusetts to be? What kind of values do we want to stand for - and pass on to our children? I agree with Rep. Bosley that it is naive to think that once casino gambling is introduced that it could be limited to only one site. Once introduced, casino gambling would likely become significant economically - as an employer, property owner, and general business presence. We need to think about what kind of community will evolve with such a presence.

Thanks, David. It’s telling that many of us are coming to the same conclusion. I find that when the progressive blogs come to a natural consensus like this, it’s very important. It’s meaningful, and it’s not caused by an echo chamber blogosphere. It usually shows that the conclusions are fairly obvious. I too again urge Governor Patrick to reject casinos in Massachusetts, because the cost is just too high.