Board of Aldermen 07-09-2019 Page 14
you know what | found in 3 months? That assessor had to respond to 13 e-mails in 90 days. That is not
that many. When | see it on a work log over and over again for half a day’s work? That’s not that many. |
chuckled, | have to tell you, when | saw those e-mails. One of the e-mails was sent by a former chief and
the question in the topic was “Ortolano” and the question was, “Does anyone know what she really wants,
can anyone figure out what is going on”. This was the beginning of November. This has gone on way too
long. Can anyone figure out? And one of our assessors, the one | was looking at, these e-mails
responded, “| think she’s got an ax to grind and | can tell you even if she wins her abatement, she’s not
going away”. | have to chuckle at that, what makes me chuckle at that is here is our chief sending an e-
mail to his four assessors to say “Does anyone know what this lady wants? She’s been done here for 2
months”. But he never invited me into his office to speak to me nor would he even come out of his office to
speak to me when | had a question, very hard to get him. Imagine how different this might have been had
he tried to figure out himself, what does this lady want? What is the problem here and what is she looking
at? Things might have been quite a lot different.
So | asked for this data and | look at these reports very carefully and | do a lot with it and | work very hard
with it because it tells a story. And I’m learning a lot about our permits, I’m learning a lot about missed
data, you know? I’m learning a lot about these values that we gave KRT that are not correct. Something is
wrong in our data capture and that’s happening through the IT Department and those are big flags to me.
I’m concerned, | am really concerned that there is an over-reach going on in the Board of Assessors that
through the City, through our City Government and our leadership that does not allow our Board to operate
independently. There are two things that bother me, back two or three months ago the Mayor had
announced at this meeting that all Board of Assessors meetings would be verbatim minutes and televised.
The Board of Assessors had no idea that was happening. They did not want verbatim minutes. When |
looked at the Charter and | called a few other city officials, former people, | said, “Can the Mayor just vote
and make a mandate that the minutes have to be changed or done a certain way” and the answer was “no”.
They said, “look in the Charter’. | did look in the Charter and from my understanding it is up to each Board
to determine how they are going to keep their public record; they have to keep a public record per the RSA
no question. But it doesn’t have to be verbatim. The reason that they didn’t want it verbatim is that they
don’t have the staff. They have got 4 clerical people, one is a supervisor, you know, everyone has said
they are up to their eyeballs in work and now you put verbatim minutes on top of them.
So when the order was given, at that point, in the meeting on a Tuesday night the clerical person had
already done the minutes not verbatim, had to go back and do them verbatim, they were 47 pages long.
And they are not used to doing that. | couldn’t understand when it was voted here why we weren’t using
another resource to outsource or have somebody else do them not within the office like we do with other
city minutes. Why were we pushing this in on the staff? We pay $800.00 to $1,000.00 to have those
minutes typed up verbatim down there. It’s really not a good use of money or resources. | just came out of
a meeting last Tuesday, it is 107 pages of minutes because it was the final go on the abatements, it was a
3-hour meeting, over 3 hours. That’s ridiculous. And when | went after the first meeting, after the vote
here, or after the Mayor said this is going to happen. | went to the Board of Assessors meeting and | talked
to one of them before the meeting began, we don’t want these. And another clerical staff said the Board
Members don’t want this, they don’t want these verbatim minutes. It is an awful lot of work for them to have
to read it and make certain 100 pages are correct as well. But that got forced into there without any vote of
the Board.
Recently in the last maybe | don’t know 2 or 3 weeks we set up an e-mail address for our Board of
Assessors, so we now have a way for the public to reach the Board. That has never happened before and
it was something | complained about because other cities like Keene, Manchester, the Board of Assessors
has addresses that you can e-mail them directly.
We don’t have phone numbers and we don’t have addresses for ours. So all of a sudden on the web site
an address appears, BOASSESS@NASHUANH.GOV. They got a web site, that’s great. | send an e-mail
in to address an issue and address a concern | have with what is going on in management in there and
within 3 minutes | get an e-mail fired back at me, very angry, from the Director; she is bull at my e-mail. |
