A regular meeting of the Board of Aldermen was held Tuesday, March 21, 2017, at 7:30 p.m. in the Aldermanic
Chamber.
President Brian S. McCarthy presided; Deputy City Clerk Judith Boileau recorded.
Prayer was offered by Deputy City Clerk Judith Boileau; Alderman-at-Large Michael B. O’Brien, Sr. led in the
Pledge to the Flag.
The roll call was taken with 14 members of the Board of Aldermen present; Alderman Wilshire were recorded
absent.
Mayor James W. Donchess and Corporation Counsel Steven A. Bolton were also in attendance.
REMARKS BY THE MAYOR
Mayor Donchess
First | wanted to speak of the ordinance pertaining to the wastewater fund which is on the agenda, O-17-31.
We've discussed this at some length in the past. In essence if you look at the adopted budget for Fiscal ’17
and previous years, the wastewater fund is presented in the green pages as a single consolidated enterprise
fund. This is how it should be handled pursuant to the City Charter and pursuant to state law. However,
despite the way it is presented in the budget, our ordinances do not really treat it as a single consolidated
enterprise fund because the ordinance says that approximately half of the wastewater treatment fund is under
the combined annual municipal budget and half is not.
Handling this in this fashion is inconsistent with the Charter and inconsistent with state law with respect to
special revenue funds. What this ordinance proposes is that the wastewater fund be treated as a single fund,
not part of the combined annual municipal budget but instead as a special revenue fund, one that is funded
through the user fees of the wastewater treatment payments and fees that customers pay throughout Nashua,
both commercial and residential.
Some people have pointed out that passing this ordinance would create additional space under the Spending
Cap for the budget that we are going to be facing in Fiscal 18. Of course it does have that affect, but this is
how special revenue funds have been handled in the past. This is not the first time that a special revenue fund
would be created outside the combined annual municipal budget. For example, several years ago for the
purpose of paving streets and road, we created a special revenue fund, that is the Mayor and the Board of
Aldermen, and moved some user fees from a couple of different sources into that fund. When that was done, it
created additional space under the Cap, just as this ordinance would do in the case of the wastewater fund.
We are proposing that this be handled in the same way that it has in the past. In the past when a special
revenue fund was created, there was no retroactive recalculation of the Cap calculation. | know there might be
people who say that this procedure should be changed now, but | think we should be consistent with the past.
Additionally, given the budget pressures we are facing this year, we really need additional space under the
Cap. We have a $2 million pension increase. We have what Pennichuck is telling us is a $400,000 increase in
the water bill. We have an electric increase of 11 percent, and we have the opportunity to increase expenses
for the dam at Mine Falls in a way that will increase revenues by more than the expenses that we incur. But
still, if you add up those items: the $2 million, the $400,000 for Pennichuck, the 11 percent rate increase for
electricity and taking over the dam out at Mine Falls, even though that is positive for our taxpayers, that is the
dam, if you include all of those things, they exceed the amount that’s available under the Cap.
We would need, in the absence of this legislation, to make severe cuts in essential services such as police
layoffs, fire layoffs, and teacher layoffs. | think we can work carefully to manage expenditures carefully so that
we can still have a manageable increase to the tax rate despite all of these increases with which we are being
hit, those being the pension, the electric, the water and everything else.
