Left In Lowell

Ask yourselves, who runs the show, the boss or the employees? Now, with a straight face, please explain to me how something like this can happen?

From The Sun:

LOWELL — The new city treasurer resigned on Monday after just one week on the job.

City Manager Bernie Lynch said on Tuesday that Greg Labrecque said he quit because Lowell wasn’t a good fit for him.

“We think he’s a good fit for us,” said Lynch.
-snip

Observers have told me that there was resistance by city workers to Lebrecque’s efforts to change the way things are done. That the political drama queens, coupled with carefully couched insubordination from staff, made Labrecque’s path back to Groveland a no brainer.

Most certainly, this whole thing will be laid at the CM’s & CFO’s feet. The drama queens never rest. They feed off the anxiety and attention of their dead tree benefactor. However, one can get a sense that the CM will not bend under the load of bullshit he is about to be assaulted with.

“His appointment gathered some political resistance and attention. It was something that he wasn’t comfortable with given the types of changes that he was being asked to put in place in the treasurer’s office,” Lynch said.

Please note: “changes that he was being asked to put in place .”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m thinking the CM is stating very plainly that he will send another, and then another, if he has to. That The Wall in City Hall will Fall.

Or, he will.

PS. Speaking of walls, how does this bode for the City Clerk office? I hope the Council has the CM’s back on reform efforts. The “Townie Turnstyle” has got to go.

It’s never pleasant when you have to do this to a friend. I stick by my comments the other day when I was angry about the leaks of executive session regarding the school committee. Never mind that it is my friend Jackie who was the source of the leak, whose motivations I believe have always been pure and whose frustrations are likely at a fever pitch with these negotiations.

Never mind, too, that there’s a huge argument to be made for opening up the union negotiations for teachers or other public employees. I had not realized that other communities have open negotiations, in part, or some even fully open. I have to wonder if it’s better than this goddamned cloak and dagger bullcrap we’ve been faced with for years, even if we’d be viewing the messy “sausage-making” commenter evelyn talked about in the previous post.

It might even benefit the teachers, if, as I have come to learn, there are remarkably awful provisions not related to money or the raise that were in the offer from the school committee. Making such provisions automatically public might help the teachers’ case that the rejection was not about the raise, it was about other things.

And I have also come to learn that Paul Georges is as responsible for leaking details of the negotiations as anyone else - in fact, did it long before Jackie did. I learned that from a first hand account. That he could be so hypocritical about the school committee leaks this weekend shows you what sort of character he has. I’m disgusted by him as well. Perhaps more so, for the hypocrisy.

And it took a lot of guts for Jackie to come out and say it was her. I’m glad she did so we can clear this up. She wrote a detailed letter to the editor about the situation, and you should read it. I’m going to leave it up to you, the readers, to figure out if you can live with her actions and reelect her to the school committee. Perhaps, for myself, I find it hard to call for the resignation of someone I know to be generally honest, smart, and good at her elected job, and maybe I still don’t know how I feel about the situation, myself, or even, how I’ll vote after this.

It’s obvious to me that she felt that the playing field was unfair with Georges dictating what went public, and perhaps the frustrations and the actions it prompted were justified. They also weren’t justified, in that it does break executive session, and as such, is a serious concern.

Whatever you as voters decide, one thing is obvious to me - the whole system is totally broken. Whether that’s because of the actions of certain individuals like Georges, who want to claim victimhood after they themselves were guilty over and over of the same misdeed, or because there is something inherently wrong with executive session negotiations and we need to address the process itself, I don’t have the answers to that. All I know is that I’m really sad we came to this point.

The Sun has an article about the school committee-teacher contract negotiations. I have a few things to say about it.

First, the reported rejection of the school committee’s offer. Look, I am sympathetic of the fact that the teachers have gone without a cost of living raise (just step increases) for the more than two years there has been no contract. It’s not fair, and it’s frustrating I am sure. Teachers work hard, and should be compensated like professionals. Their job is so important to a strong community.

However, I think asking for too much right now forces the school committee to choose between raises, and JOBS. Chapter 70 money is merely level-funded right now, if even that, and the city can hardly afford to greatly increase their part of the school budget, given the amount of local aid from the state. Medical insurance and other expenses are going up, up, up. This eats into the budget every year. We’re in a serious downtown for heaven’s sake! People are getting laid off right, left, and center in both the private AND the public sector. Why doesn’t this reality sink in? Accept a modest forward-going raise that kicks in over time so the school committee can feel confident they can fund it, or watch colleagues get laid off!!

I am a public and private union sympathizer, but Paul Georges sometimes make it VERY hard for me to sympathize with the teacher’s union and their demands. This isn’t the first time that’s happened. I know his job is to be a hard ass, but enough is enough.

However, that is not the only outrage in that article, and now we come to the real reason for this post. From the article (important part in bold):

As contract negotiations continue behind closed doors between the School Committee and United Teachers of Lowell, one School Committee member tells The Sun that union leaders refused a 3 percent raise offered by the committee this week.

“They are sharks,” said the committee member, who agreed to speak anonymously because negotiations are protected by executive-session privilege. “We have really extended ourselves with the best offer we could make, but it is not enough for them.”

Who the goddamned hell broke executive session rules to comment on the rejection in the first place??

I would like to see that person LOSE the upcoming election. What. An. IDIOT. We NEED to know who that person is.

Of course, the Sun went to Paul Georges for a reaction to the anonymous comment, which included a very incendiary “they are sharks.”

If you thought the negotiations have been grueling, unproductive, and contentious up til now, just wait. Thanks to this stupid farking anonymous School Committee member, the teachers now have an excuse to be even more pissed off. And rightly so. The rules of negotiation were violated by one party. This is not negotiating in good faith. Haven’t we had enough public personnel fights fought in the pages of the Lowell Sun (the former Superintendent) to be smart enough to refrain from this sort of ethical lapse?

My god. If we do not find out what elected moron commented and leaked executive session negotiations, then we need to concentrate on ousting all the incumbents we can and replacing them with all the challengers running. Even though I am a supporter of some of the incumbents.

If I were the rest of the School Committee, I would publicly come out and state they were not the leak, so by process of elimination, we can figure out who was. Sure, there’s a chance someone might lie about it, but if we continue to have elected officials undermining delicate negotiations, I am ready with the pitchfork of my vote to retire them posthaste. And you should be too.

Now that it’s official, the Senate race just got interesting!

If you’re interested, you can go to her website to sign up for updates, or to volunteer.

A nice intro and coming-home post on BMG from Elizabeth Warren, which while not broaching the subject of running for the US Senate seat, certainly gives off all the right signals, especially this:

I left Washington, but I don’t plan to stop fighting for middle class families. I spent years working against special interests and have the battle scars to show it – and I have no intention of stopping now. It is time for me to think hard about what role I can play next to help rebuild a middle class that has been hacked at, chipped at, and pulled at for more than a generation—and that that is under greater strain every day.

In the weeks ahead, I want to hear from you about the challenges we face and how we get our economy growing again. I also want to hear your ideas about how we can fix what all of us – regardless of party – know is a badly broken political system.

I myself am hoping she runs, and decides to jump in soon. This is about the time of year another candidate - a completely unknown quantity - began making the rounds ahead of his election. The year was 2005 and his name was Deval Patrick. If she can leverage her public profile (an advantage Patrick didn’t have) and get the campaign going right, she can win, and she’d clean Brown’s clock. Just the sort of candidate I, and many other progressives, might be looking for.

Longtime friend of the blog (and former front pager) Kristin Ross-Sitcawich has decided to run for School Committee. This comes as no shock to me, as I’ve been helping her with her web presence and such.

Kristin has two school-aged children, both of whom attend Lowell public schools, so of course she wants to see them get the best education possible. You probably remember that she’s run for city council in the past and is an avid city activist, particularly in working to help the homeless. I met Kristin during her first run for the Council, and continue to support her because she is smart, knowledgeable, and progressive, while at the same time having a strong conservative streak of never wanting to see taxpayer money wasted. She loves efficiency and scrutinizing data in order to make informed decisions, and at the same time is passionate about the idea that those decisions must be centered around what’s best for the kids.

Her website is www.kristinforlowellkids.com, you can follow her on Twitter @kristinforsc, and you can like her facebook page in order to stay updated on the campaign. You can also read the Sun article of her announcement here.

Move Lowell Forward PAC has just launched our new website today (in the wee sma’s I can personally tell you) which is a much cleaner, streamlined system for posting news, reports from us, and information about the upcoming election. It boasts a nicer look (optimized graphically for the latest browsers, but if you’re not keeping up your browser, you’re asking for security problems anyway, and the site still works for the oldest browsers as well). But it also boasts the ability for us to have more control over its content much more quickly, which means timely postings of the things we’re working on or with.

So, we look forward to continuing to add information to the site, and hope it is more useful to you. Speaking of new things you might want to check out there, is our latest paper (to be presented tomorrow night at the Council meeting), “Renewed Economic Growth to Stabilize City Finances.”

One area we hope to get more content in is the “recaps” of committee and council meetings. When there’s a vote we find important, or an issue we think should have some airing, we’ll talk about it there.

Senator Eileen Donoghue has been named chair of the state Senate’s Committee on Tourism, Arts and Cultural Development. Pretty cool, and it bodes well for the district, especially Lowell.

She also is serving on the following:

Donoghue will also serve as vice chair of the Joint Committee on Higher Education, and a member of the committees on Economic Development & Emerging Technologies; Telecommunications, Utilities & Energy; and Community Development & Small Business.

All have some obvious advantages, but she will have the opportunity to keep UML and MCC in mind as well as the rest of our state public higher ed; affect green energy policy and emerging tech (like nano?); and do some good on the economic front. All good areas of policy for Lowell. I look forward to seeing what Donoghue does on these issues!

Or as good as - the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has been forwarded past the filibuster threat in the Senate by a 63-33 vote, pretty much assuring its passage.

This is a long time coming - the nation, and the military, has been ready for this for a long time. Now, we can finally allow gays to openly serve as they do in many other countries. Gays and lesbians have been on the front lines in war, risking their lives for their country. And now they will not be thrown out for being who they are.

Congrats to the activists who fought so hard for this. It is a victory that took too long, but it is a victory.

Though he’s wrong on almost every other issue, kudos on this to Senator Scott Brown for voting for our gay servicemen and women. (Note: I can’t find the role call but at 63 votes to pass, mathematically he has to be one of the yes votes.) Also kudos to Sen. John Kerry, who fought for this for a long time.

Apparently he has passed away after a short illness. There was a lot of friction between Pat and I, but he was a hard worker and passionate about politics, and about Lowell, and my condolences to his family for their loss.

It seems to be a bad month for losing political and public figures. I hope that this is the last condolence thread I have to make for a long while.