Great Headline!! Council gets a tough task done right!

Great Headline, and a fact filled article fom the Lowell Sun.

Council gets a tough task done right!

LOWELL -- The quick coming together of the Lowell City Council in regard to the city's new fiscal budget is a good sign of maturity and common sense by the elected body.

The council could have played games and tweaked some numbers, but instead recognized this was a reasonable compromise for spending over the next 12 months that won't kill taxpayers, won't harm city workers, won't reduce city services, won't see huge increases in fees and will continue investing in the future of Lowell.

Considering that most cities and towns are struggling with budgets, laying off workers, reducing services and adding fees, Lowellians should be pleased the city manager and the council have taken the city through a rough financial period relatively unscathed.

The School Department will take some hits, but overall the budget is a sign of good, prudent compromise.

Some can argue the city manager perhaps should have looked at some layoffs and given additional funding to the schools. Some feel he should not have given any pay raises and should have reduced
health-care, sick-leave and buy-back provisions that far exceed the norm.

Those are issues that need to be addressed, but not under the crunch of a budget deadline.

Now that this budget is behind us, those are the types of issues that need to be faced while we have time to do it properly.

I had a good time at some fundraisers last weekend including the "Dancing with the Stars" event Saturday at Shedd Park and the Boys and Girls Club golf tourney Monday at Indian Ridge Country Club.

The Friends of Shedd Park have done a great job with their event, raised a lot of money over the last several years and put it all back into improvements at the park. It's a great initiative launched by
a collection of neighborhood people who turned fundraising for a good cause into a real fun event.

We should also be grateful to the folks who were willing to "dance" to help the cause. This year's stars were Nancy Donahue, Mayor Bud Caulfield, Larry and Connie Martin, Karen Bell and Jim O'Donnell. They also got great support from some UMass Lowell dance program students and faced a very mean panel of judges including councilor Rita Mercier, Tom McKay and yours truly.

While the Friends of Shedd Park is a relatively new group helping a great cause, the Boys and Girls Club staged its 29th charity golf tourney on Monday with an enormous number of volunteers who have
supported the club for years helping out on a real hot day for golf. Lowell is lucky it has so many people willing to help out on good causes.

And while we are praising the council and community volunteers, one has to wonder about the Lowell School Committee.

What are the members thinking?

Sneaking through raises for top administrators in a lean budget year, just seems way out of line. Maybe there are good explanations we just haven't heard, but when one member is appealing to the City
Council to add another $250,000 to the School Committee budget one night and the next night we learn there are salary adjustment looming that probably will equal close to that amount, it leaves people shaking their heads.

Individually, there are some pretty smart, experienced people on the committee. But collectively, one just never knows what is happening. The latest move just feeds the discussion of election reform that could see the elimination of a school committee as we have known it.

It's a thankless job. We can barely get a slate of candidates to run and the same people keep getting elected because nobody else runs. Perhaps this is the time to look at alternatives.

One thought is to expand the council and have a subcommittee on education.

Another option is to elect three board members and appoint three members to the school board. This is the time to consider ballot questions for next year's city election.

Running the city of Lowell is now a $300 million operation. I've long felt expanding the council, greatly increasing the salary and giving oversight to education is one possible solution to getting more
people involved and ending the last-minute division between the council and the school board over proper funding.

I've been disappointed in the School Committee ever since many of the members failed to even consider the possibility of building a new high school outside of the downtown area when a group of business people and community leaders volunteered to explore the issue. It never got a warm and fuzzy reaction from members who don't want to look at facts. Maybe it wouldn't work, but what was the harm of gathering facts.

Downtown Lowell has changed dramatically. Maybe it doesn't make sense any more to release 3,700 kids in the downtown everyday at the same time. No matter how much is spent to improve the current site, it may never be adequate by today's standards. The site itself might have a far more economic value for luxury housing, office or retail use.

But there appears to be no will to even look at the idea for a project that might be a win-win for the city and the School Department.