Next Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting agenda includes a rather mundane mish-mash of motions, responses and public hearings. Except for this little nugget;

The dean of the council, Rita Mercier, has put forth a motion to enter into negotiations with City Manager Tom Golden on a contract extension. Golden, who took the reins at City Hall on April 28, 2022, is currently working on a five-year contract that will expire in April of 2027.

InsideLowell had picked up increasing speculation about the Manager’s status, as the Frontrunner City initiative gained momentum.

The announcement this past Tuesday night that an agreement between the City and the United Nations entities involved in the program had been agreed upon and signed, making Lowell the first Frontrunner city in the entire United States, became a topic of discussion on today’s InsideLowell Daily Pulse podcast with Ray Boutin. Ironically, the council agenda with the motion on the Manager’s extension came out less than three hours after the conclusion of the podcast recording.

Mercier has not yet responded to a request for comment. Golden, however, seems interested in having that conversation.

“I am honored to serve the people of Lowell,” Golden said. “I very much look forward to the discussion and am humbled to be considered.”

Attention now turns to whether Mercier’s motion will garner enough support to begin those discussions.

You’ll recall in the final year of Eileen Donoghue’s four-year tenure, an effort had been made to offer her an extension by then Councilor Bill Samaras, an effort which she didn’t embrace at the time .

By the time Councilor Dave Conway filed a similar motion in August of 2021, with Donoghue this time expressing interest in the extension, the Council was three months away from the first election under the new District Representation system. Conway’s effort was defeated, with even Samaras voting against it at the time.

Will the effort to extend Golden succeed? We should have a more definitive answer once Tuesday’s discussion begins.

From this vantage point, it appears there is enough support on the city’s legislative body to at least enter into negotiations, especially on the heels of the recent Frontrunner City status and last March’s big news about UMass Lowell’s East Campus development, now known as the Lowell Innovation Network Corridor (LINC) project.