On a recent vacation I flipped through the soft porn blockbuster “Fifty Shades of Grey” per order of the middle-aged women’s travel handbook. Upon my return I attended the City Council meeting, where I penned the following racy novella, “Two Shades of Tax Classification.”

WORCESTER — For the second fiscal year in a row, the City Council has narrowed the gap between the city's residential and commercial-industrial tax rates.

Whether they liked it or not, Worcester taxpayers finally found out what their tax rate is this year. On Tuesday, just weeks before the end of the fiscal year, city councilors set the residential rate for fiscal 2012 at $16.98 per $1,000 assessed value. The commercial-industrial rate was set at $29.08 per $1,000.

Setting the tax rates for fiscal year 2012 last night, the Worcester City Council lessened the divide between residential and commercial-industrial rates.

It has recently come to light that Worcester's Assessing Department has been undervaluing about 2,000 commercial and industrial properties — in some cases drastically —for several decades. Who is to blame? Will these costly mistakes be investigated? What will happen if values have to be adjusted?

WORCESTER — The Citywide Parent Planning Advisory Committee, a parent group representing all city schools, started an online petition yesterday asking the City Council to fund the public schools at least 3 percent more than the state requires.

It's not just in geography that the city of Worcester is the center of Central Massachusetts. Almost a third of workers in Worcester County are employed in the city. Major organizations headquartered in Worcester, such as UMass Memorial Health Care and Reliant Medical Group, have satellite offices throughout the region. Stores in the suburbs have customers who drive out from the city, and manufacturers have suppliers there.

Does a new downtown Worcester have potential through a mix of commercial and residential development?

If some of the recent successes of Providence and Lowell can be imitated, then the answer to that question is yes.

WORCESTER — Most of the major cities in New England hit rock bottom at some point over the last four decades, as their manufacturing bases fled the high cost of doing business in the North and moved to more welcoming, and usually much warmer, states around the nation.

WORCESTER — Councilor-at-Large Konstantina B. Lukes is resurrecting an idea that City Manager Michael V. O'Brien brought up eight years ago — removing the police and fire chiefs from Civil Service.