Listening to Teddy this morning, I felt bad for him. It really struck me how blind the Cawley side was to the reality of the situation. I give Teddy some credit for acknowledging that the final word has been had, though in my opinion he entirely missed the point: ultimately yesterday’s vote didn’t matter. The high school was never going to be built at Cawley even if all the votes and all the people wanted it there. This isn’t a case of “the people have spoken and the will of the people must be followed.” The costs of the Cawley site, when looked at realistically, were always going to be something approaching double the cost of the Downtown site and the services, the access, the bussing, the environmental impact, the lawsuits, the number of properties that would have required eminent domain — they always made it a really poor choice. And it was those flaws with the Cawley site which were so far beyond what they want to believe or are able to see, that meant Cawley would eventually “Fall under its own weight” as Jim Millanazo said.
One of the big problems in the debate had to do with the constantly moving target the Cawley side offered and the refrain of “We’ll find a creative solution.” The refusal to understand that the widening of Rte 38 was going to require as many as 12-15 properties be taken, and MASS DOT was going to require that, regardless whether we ‘wanted’ to do it or not is a huge point. The MEPA review that takes a year, and a LOT of money, on top of the high likelihood that the review could/would require finding a new site is another thing that was dismissed but was true. The fact that we hadn’t got to the point in the process that such costs could be determined with accuracy doesn’t mean they should have been ignored.
It also didn’t help that the Cawley supporters were VERY selective about their cherry-picked math. The purposeful misdirection using the ‘total cost’ versus the ‘cost after reimbursement’ for example. Subtracting items from the Cawley side of the ledger that could just as easily be subtracted from the DT side (Special ed, bussing plan etc) ignoring infrastructure that would obviously be needed or demanding that it be considered as a separate thing (like the drainage issues that have been ignored for decades) — that sort of willful blindness to the realities of math and the politicizing of facts diminished their credibility and in a spiraling way as the Newspaper and WCAP amplified the ludicrous contortions they were doing to try to make it all fit.
Even when the best argument of the Cawley side was brought up, the years of construction are going to be awkward and difficult, it was often done with such nastiness they undermined their argument. Thinking the Downtown site was better for the kids long term doesn’t mean that a person can’t be concerned about that process — it just meant that they thought the 5 years of construction were part of the cost of doing this. Instead the Cawley side frequently resorted to histrionics and exaggerated dangers. This might work rhetorically and it might move some voters, but it doesn’t improve a flawed site or diminish the many advantages of the central location of the other.
When Teddy spoke today about the vote in June he entirely missed the point that it too was a non-binding vote. That vote was a recommendation to MSBA — an organization that looks at everything, all the facts, the votes, the benefits, and the needs and compares it to their charter and makes a decision independent of the City Council’s vote. Despite what they said a couple of months ago about “the city knows best’ — that may be what they want to do, but if the city chooses a poor site (like Cawley) they will (and do) override the decision. The city council vote was never an ‘etched in stone’ thing and oddly enough, the MSBA could STILL say that Cawley is the better choice.
Today, in the aftermath of last night’s election, Teddy also brought up the eminent domain of the dentists and how he thinks they’ll settle on one of the other options — though with a 7-2 vote I don’t think he’s right, nor do I think the threats of the dentists are credible. The value of the property is simply not there, and there are very good viable options for them nearby at the Hamilton Canal district that tremendously limit the damage to their business. I’ll take the legal opinions of several lawyers over John Cox’s scare-tactics in this case. This was never really about eminent domain.
It was also interesting that they undercut their own arguments at times, for example, saying on one hand that “The renovation of the old building will just be paint and new ceiling tiles” while at the same time screaming about asbestos and construction disruption — implying that it’s a LOT more than just paint and ceiling tiles. The architects were extremely clear in meetings that this was Renovated to new — a down to the studs renovation that will go over the old building, reconfiguring parts and giving us a state of the art facility. They said it over and over, it was in the plans and records and meetings — and yet the Cawley side could never get past it. Here’s one big problem they faced — asking the question, “Isn’t new always better than renovated” in the city of Lowell is going to get you a big fat “NO!” from a large majority of the citizens. In fact, one of the biggest regrets in our city’s recent past is that we tore down so many of our boarding houses and other historic buildings. This was a huge part of why their movement failed. For the last 3 decades, we’ve rebuilt our city into a model other cities study and try to emulate — not by building all new buildings, but by renovating and preserving our old buildings. Hard to sell ‘new is better’ to a population that KNOWS it’s not.
Finally, I think the Cawley side missed the fact that they caused this giant wave to sweep over them. If they’d simply put the question on the ballot and changed their stance from “Cawley no matter what” to “What the people want” 10,000 people wouldn’t have signed a petition and thousands more than that received phone calls, and thousands more than that had a knock on the door to ask them to consider the reality of the situation. By making hundreds of volunteers engage thousands of citizens, they drove up the vote against them, and by digging in, they give no room to support them for other things.
Teddy and the Lowell Sun will surely keep banging the drums of what a big ‘mistake’ we just made, but this is an indication of how woefully blinded the entire Cawley side is to reality, and the delusions they fell victim to as they were trapped inside the echo chambers they created when they suppressed their opposition’s voices and points of view .
It’s this sort of blindness inherent to the Cawley point of view that saved the City of Lowell MILLIONS of dollars yesterday by killing the Cawley option before we went much further down that fatally flawed path. Unlike many people, I never really worried about the high school actually moving, I worried about wasting millions of tax payer dollars on a really bad idea that would never actually work in reality.
I sincerely do not mean to be presumptuous. I have no expectation that any Cawley Supporter would agree with my reflections and beliefs — but I do want the historic record to consider some of these ideas. Soon, someone will write the book on this, and The Lowell Sun’s record might not entirely cover this point of view.
