This week’s Lowell City Council agenda echoes Elections Director Will Rosenberry’s preferred Special Election date to replace District 1 councilor Danny Rourke, while also revealing the potential cost of purchasing and rehabbing the Senior Center on Broadway Street.
On the Tuesday September 29th edition of the Daily Pulse Podcast, Rosenberry indicated he would like to see the council set December 15, 2026 as the date, the earliest possible date in the 64-120 day timeline required by law. While a vote still has to be taken to make the election calendar official, it appears the council agrees with the Elections Director’s recommendation:
Interesting to note that if this calendar is approved, and we have no reason to believe it won’t be, nomination papers will become available the following day, Wednesday October 7.
To this point, only two candidates have publicly expressed interest in seeking the Pawtucketville neighborhood seat, Ray Boutin and Rodney Elliott.
Meanwhile, after dominating the political discourse earlier this year, the Senior Center is back in the spotlight with a loan order request authorizing the City Manager to spend more than $11-million dollars to purchase the property and fund necessary repairs spelled out by Gale Associates, a consulting engineering firm. That figure climbs to nearly $13-million dollars, $12,783,552 to be exact, when interest payments are added to the $3,372,454 purchase price.
Interestingly, the Loan Order gives the City Manager the authority to acquire the property “by purchase, gift, eminent domain, or otherwise,” though it’s hard to imagine that numerous executive session discussions by the council and negotiations between the parties haven’t led to some type of understanding of the numbers required to make an agreeable purchase work without engaging in an adversarial eminent domain taking, a la the former dentist’s offices that became part of the Lowell High School construction project.
Hopefully, the discussion on the council floor will also answer the question of why and how this agreement was deemed more beneficial to taxpayers than the negotiated deal shot down by the council earlier this year.
That agreement called for the city to continue leasing the property for a period of 15-years at an annual rate of $504,000, amounting to a cost of $7,560.000, after which ownership would transfer to the city.
Under that scenario, Lowell could have used federal money from the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program to cover the rent, instead of the city’s taxpayers fully funding the purchase price, debt service, repairs and maintenance.
Complicating the debate at the time was the property owner reneging on a 2001 lease agreement that would have turned the property over to the city after 20-years. No explanation has been publicly provided for why the agreed upon transfer never took place, and many councilors publicly questioned why the city would continue t0 pay rent on a building it “owned.”
Solicitor Corey Williams maintained language in the recorded deed did not give the city ownership of the property and that a court battle was likely to fail, an opinion backed up by local real estate attorney Christa Emerson during a Daily Pulse podcast in late February.
Given the fact this same governing body now stands poised to vote on buying the property in question, it appears the debate over who legally owns it has been answered.
7 responses to “Special Election Date & Senior Center Purchase on Agenda”
If the Council voted to give away almost 15 million dollars of LOWELL taxpayer money for a building which can be rented and paid for by federal grants at NO COST to the Lowell taxpayer, this Council some serious ethical questions they will need to answer.
Sounds to me like a couple of inflated ego’s on the council letting their disdain for Nick Sarris take over. What a horrible, petty deal that once again takes (unnecessarily) money out of the taxpayers pockets.
Or… rent space elsewhere instead of financially rewarding someone who broke their word to the City and taxpayers.
So to put this simply and bluntly, this was basically a textbook choice between “Scylla and Charybdis”! The city council was trapped between two bad options with no clean way out. They were forced to choose between two terrible options, throw away $7.5 million in rent over 15 years and walk away with zero equity, or take on a painful $13 million debt to buy the building outright.
They chose the upfront financial hit to guarantee that the city permanently owns the Senior Center, rather than remaining at the mercy of a landlord dispute 15 years from now. The city council instead chose the path of buying out the problem because the other solutions were either legally unfeasible like suing, unpredictable like a hostile eminent domain, or even more expensive like building a new center from scratch.
So in essence, it was the only logical and wise choice to make going forward. Why, because the city council made the most fiscally sound and sensible decision that was available under the most terrible of circumstances.
Plus, walking away to avoid “rewarding” a landlord who clearly broke his word sounds noble on paper, but in reality, it would completely backfire on the hardworking taxpayers. Because the Lowell Senior Center isn’t just an empty office building, it has industrial kitchens for daily meals, medical transport services, and critical veteran programs.
So if the city just packed up and rented some random commercial space somewhere else, the cost to entirely gut, retrofit, and rebuild to meet state building codes would end up costing the hardworking taxpayers millions more than this purchase price.
Also, a “principled” exit would only succeed in punishing two groups, the hardworking taxpayers, and the veterans/seniors, who would have their lifeline completely disrupted. Believe me, the city council didn’t reward a developer, instead, they executed a hard-nosed corporate decision to save a very critical city service. They were making a practical and calculated business choice and not an emotional one.
So long as Chef Joseph Wilkins remains is all that matters most. Chef of the Year !
Also in total fairness here, Lowell City Manager Tom Golden, City Solicitor Corey Williams and the City Council inherited this mess. Because the original decision to hand the public land over to a private trust, under an agreement that promised the building would be “gifted and donated” back to the city after 20 years was authorized by a 9-to-0 City Council vote all the way back on May 8, 2001.
So City Manager Golden, City Solicitor Williams, as well as the City Council had absolutely nothing to do with creating that deeply flawed, 25-year-old ultimate real estate legal loophole. They all simply inherited that catastrophic administrative fallout when the landlord reneged on the handshake deal, his word and refused to hand over the deed.