Left In Lowell

The story on the Sun’s website this morning mentions the breach of School Committee executive privilege regarding raises in the school department, stating that though Jim Leary admits to talking about the session with some individuals, it was not with anyone at the Lowell Sun or anyone who talked to the Lowell Sun:

“That was not the case, the Lowell Sun was not contacted by me under any circumstances,” Leary said, adding that Sun Editor Jim Campanini had called him to ask about the negotiations. “I told him I could not speak about it.”

He did admit, however, to mentioning the executive session to his father in the western part of the state and two unnamed individuals.

He also began telling Mayor Caulfield about the aforementioned executive meeting, though Caulfield stopped him, stating that because he did not attend (though he is on the SC), that it was a breach of executive session, a rule of which Leary was not aware.

However, someone did talk to the Lowell Sun (how circular is it to have the Lowell Sun write a piece about leaking executive session information to someone at the Lowell Sun? Who watches the watchers? There are people at the Lowell Sun who could answer this question for us, are there not? Judy Miller went to jail for this sort of thing…). If Leary did not, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t find out who did.

Oh, and your Lowell Rumor Mill at work, again:

Leary said last week he was called by committee member Connie Martin, who chairs the subcommittee, and was told that someone told her that he had told The Sun the committee was in the process of negotiating new contracts for the four assistant superintendents behind closed doors.

Uh huh. Right. Someone said something about someone, so it must be true! (Not that I don’t blame SC Martin for following up, in fact she did the right thing by talking directly to Leary herself instead of whispering it in a dark corner like everyone else.)

After the last executive session leak (regarding the terms of the new superintendent’s contract under discussion at the time), we were promised an investigation into any further leaks (as mentioned in the article). Though Martin is paraphrased as noting this admitted breach by Leary doesn’t warrant an investigation (since it appears it didn’t go past private individual conversations…and I may or may not agree with Martin), I would like an investigation into the same information that was leaked to the Sun. Those conversations went far and above private conversations, and may damage future negotiations or relationships in the school department because the information went prematurely public.

The results of negotiations of city contracts are always made public before being adopted, so it’s not like the public doesn’t have a say before a decision is made. Our elected officials come before us and have to justify their budgets and contracts no matter what. However, private employment discussions are first conducted in executive session for a reason: there is a sensitive nature in coming before your bosses and negotiating a contract or dealing with a personnel problem, and a process which from the start is fully public would discourage city employees from coming forth or getting a fair hearing.

Imagine if your boss in the private sector had a policy of talking about your salary or the nature of your employment in front of all your colleagues. Imagine the chilling effect that would have on your forthrightness or ability to advocate for your salary.

For that reason, the breach to the Sun is as serious as the previous one, and should be recommended to the DA for investigation. Lowell’s city government’s reputation is at stake here. Like the rumor of election rigging which destroys our confidence in our democracy, we can lose our faith in our elected officials’ ability to follow the law. If the breaches of executive sessions in both the school committee and (in the past) the council do not stop soon, that confidence will be eroded. That is not a good situation for anyone.

This past Wednesday (June 11), the Lowell Sun editorial had a scathing denunciation of the School Committee’s consideration of a major salary adjustment for the four Lowell Public School Assistant Superintendents as well as “pay increases [that averages out to] 11 percent to 10 department heads and supervisors.”

However, the following day in an article written by the Sun’s school issues reporter, Jennifer Myers, there is an explanation why the department heads and supervisors are getting this type of raise: (more…)

For a few weeks now I have been hearing rumors that Michael Lafleur, the Sun’s Lowell City Hall reporter was leaving the paper. Today, I learned that it is not a rumor but a fact. He is the second major reporter to leave the paper in as many months. In April, Hilary Chabot, who covered the State House, moved to the Herald.

Lafleur will be leaving at the end of the end of the month and will attend law school. He joined the Sun in 2002. Given the state of the newspaper industry, I think this is an excellent career move. A law degree combined with his experience in journalism should give him a lot of flexibility and opportunities.

As for the City of Lowell, I think his absence will hurt civic life. Whoever the Sun assigns to the city political beat will require a certain amount of time before they establish themselves.

I always found Lafleur’s articles to be informative but it is his knowledge of the Lowell political landscape that I will miss the most.

On behalf of LiL, Mike, good luck and best wishes! And if the law school gig does not work out, we could always use an additional blogger.

Via MassMarrier, I read the Bay Windows interview with Governor Patrick and his daughter, who has come publicly out as a lesbian. What was her mother’s reaction? Relief that she wasn’t coming to them with a bad grade. That’s how it should be for every teen.

The Governor and his wife have spent a lot of time trying to keep their girls out of the limelight, but decided on the interview before any hurtful “gotcha” news could be posted. Best wishes to Katherine, and to her older, straight sister Sarah, who, as Patrick says, did not have to have an interview just to come out as straight. Maybe someday, a gay person will be afforded the same courtesy.

I just love the last quote from the Governor:

“You know, I can still - because we live in Massachusetts - I can still imagine what Katherine’s wedding is going to be like.” Lowering his voice, he adds, “How much it’s gonna cost.”

And how can anyone be so heartless as to want to deny her that?

Since this topic, what is a blog, and what it means to be anonymous, and where do journalistic standards come in, has been getting some pixelspace lately on LiL, I found Ryan’s commentary over at Below Boston, “Some Serious Netroots Reform,” particularly apt and timely.

First, Ryan outlines a similar idea that I have:

But in Ritchie’s case, as I suggested in the diary, his only serious mistake was to confuse blogging with commenting. Unfortunately, it’s an all-too common situation.

As someone with some experience in local campaigns, I hear time and time again people talking about comments on WickedLocal and other community papers as “the blogs.” It’s a dangerous precedent that must be kept in check, immediately.

It’s easy to see where the confusion grows: most of the population’s never been to a blog; people just think any online commentary is simply ‘blogging.’ It would be nice if we could chalk this up to one big confusion, but by allowing this misunderstanding to take place, the reputation of blogs as useful tools is being sullied, all the while the real culprits are free from actually fixing the problem.

Follow me after the break, it’s a long post… (more…)

The Sun reports on the trash collection proposal by the CM, expected revenues from which appear in the new budget. While I really applaud the direction this conversation has taken, I wonder, does it go far enough?

The plan has residents (those not in condos, anyway) paying $125/year, a modest $25 increase (hey, not much more than the last few years’ increase in that tank of gas I got this morning - $44 for a 10.7 gallon fill up!). This will entitle residents to one 65-gallon trash bin full of trash per week. But I wonder, why not pay per bag for all of the trash you put at the curb, reduce or eliminate the per-year fee (just make sure the per-bag fee covers the difference), and really truly encourage recycling, and real PAYT?

Maybe this half-step measure is getting us partway so we can consider the further incentive-development of total PAYT. Perhaps we will have to revisit going whole hog. As Lynch notes, “even under the new system, and with a 25 percent citywide recycling rate between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2009 — the second half of the fiscal year — there still will be a deficit of nearly $2.5 million next year.”

For our household, I could put two, sometimes three weeks’ trash into a 65 gallon bin. (By the way, are we going to have to get uniform bins now so no one sneaks in a bigger bin?) Then again, I already recycle everything and compost my food scraps, so I know that our trash stream is much smaller, even for our two-person household, than it would be otherwise. Perhaps limiting trash to a 65-gallon bin is incentive enough for most average households in the city.

So how much trash do you produce, and what are your thoughts on the proposal, which only goes partway towards PAYT, but in my opinion, at least heads in the right direction?

When a concept keeps you awake at night thinking about how cool it is, it’s time to explore implementing it. So it was last night, when at 3am I found myself going over in my head for over an hour and a half exactly how, technically, I could transition this site, as long promised, into hosting more community content from all of greater Lowell. (This morning, I am exhausted from the lack of sleep…)

I’ve had my head in ExpressionEngine development for a couple weeks straight now, working on sites for clients. ExpressionEngine is a CMS (content management software) that I discovered last summer, and I have since become something of an advanced EE developer. It’s an affordable commercial product which combines the strength of open source (development of addons and improvements by the community of developers) with the sort of support which isn’t as hit or miss as other open source, free platforms like Drupal or WordPress, which, while powerful, drive me nuts both in implementation and in trying to get help with problems. I’m something of an EEvangelist these days. It’s great software, flexible, customizable, powerful.

But it’s exceedingly hard for me to make the LiL upgrade project a priority while concurrently running my business. And though transporting existing WordPress blogs into EE is possible, it’s tricky, and something I would likely want to hire out to a pro. The software also costs some small amount of cash, and in order to prioritize my time (and EE takes a lot of time to custom-develop) I need to at least get paid a little bit. Also, I may want to buy some of the affordable modules other developers have created to accomplish goals such as a recommended list with ratings, etc. So. Here’s the deal.

I am looking for advanced pledges of donations to make this happen. My goal is $1500 in total promised money (if we go above that, more features will be built). I say pledged donations because I don’t want to actually take anyone’s money unless I reach the goal and can actually do this project. Don’t pledge if you think you won’t have the money in a month. And don’t pledge if you can’t afford it, either, I don’t want blood from a stone!

What you’ll get for your money, if the project can go forward:

• Community posting ability and User Post list similar (but better!) to Blue Mass Group or dKos (though User Post privileges will be given out on a case by case basis, to maximize quality, and geographical/community group/political coverage)
• Registered user system with email validation - no more waiting for moderation, just log in and comment.
• A very cool events calendar that any registered user can add to.
• Some sort of ratings system/recommend list
• Moderator ability to “frontpage” interesting or important posts from users
• Better organization of information
• A far better advanced search function - EE’s native search module is incredible.

Other cool ideas that could be incorporated:

• Ability to grant community users the privilege to post photo galleries or MP3 podcasts.
• RSS feeds in the sidebar from other regional progressive or governmental blogs like richardhowe.com, jackiedoherty.org, or the CM’s blog so you always know when they’ve posted something new, and we at LiL can more regularly drive traffic to these excellent resources.
• Other requested features you might think of that you would like to see. Have a cool idea? Let me know!

There you have it. There’s all this great potential, but it takes a lot of time and money to make it happen, and I just can’t do it alone. But with help, this site can become more useful to the community, the way I always had intended it to be. If you can pledge, any amount (and only pledge if you intend to follow through, on the honor system!) send me an email, lynne [at] leftinlowell.com (replace the [at] with @ and get rid of the spaces) so I can tally up the amounts and see if this ship can afford to leave the port.

I want to try to capitalize and improve upon the community-blog model that’s been pioneered by Scoop-driven blogs, without miring the site in outdated or inflexible code. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide, and I hope we can make this a reality.

As Kristin mentioned, both her and I were among the 2,500 delegates to the Democratic State Convention which took place yesterday at the Lowell’s Tsongas arena. If you want to read details both Matt Murphy at the Sun and Matt Viser at the Globe were there and their articles gives you a pretty good idea of what happened.

But the only news to come out of that Convention is that this fall, Senator John Kerry will have a challenger, Ed O’Reilley, in the Democratic primary; the first time in his 24 year career. How did this happened? (more…)

In case you missed it, CM Bernie Lynch and his administration have posted the FY 2009 City Budget on line as they did last year with the FY 2008 Budget. The 156 page document was distributed to the City Council members earlier last week. It will be discussed tomorrow night and Tuesday night by the CC and then voted on.

In his introductory remarks, CM Bernie Lynch gives us the good news and an explanation on the presentation of this budget: (more…)

I was contacted by a Lowell resident and a frequent LiL commentator, who is a Republican, and asked why LiL did not have a post on State Senator James Marzilli situation, especially since the City of Lowell unwillingly played a major role. I inferred from the question that perhaps he thought LiL was trying to protect a fellow Massachusetts liberal; not at all. I think it is a personal tragedy for the Marzilli family that should not be used for political gain. But at the same time, I am quite angry that a number of Lowell women may have been victimized by him.

The Herald as well as other media outlets are reporting that Marzilli “has checked into a medical facility and has taken an indefinite leave from the Senate.” Marzilli had already announce that he would not seek reelection this fall.

And as for us in Lowell, we should feel pretty good about who we are. If you read the details of the story, you will see that we have brave women who are not intimidated, citizens who speak up and get involved, and a professional and competent police department.