Search

City of Nashua
Planning Department
229 Main Street
Nashua, New Hampshire 03061-2019

Planning & Zoning 603 588-3090
WEB www. nashuanh.aay

MEMORANDUM

Date: September 18, 2019

To: Ald. Michael B. O’Brien, Sr., Chair and Committee on Infrastructure

From: Linda McGhee. Deputy Planning Manager LN

RE; Referral from the Committee on Infrastructure — Petition to Release Facade
Easement.

At the Nashua City Planning Board's regularly scheduled meeting of September 12,
2019 the Planning Board voted unanimously 1o make a favorable recommendation
on the above referral.

If you have any questions concerning this notification, please contact me at 589-
3110.

ce: Mayor Jim Donchess
Legislative Office
Sue Lovering. City Clerk
Scott LeClair, Chair, NPCB
Sarah Marchant, Community Development Director

RLHciw

Neshue Histaric istrict Commission

229 Main Street Nashua, NH 03061-2016

To: Board of Aldermen - Infrastructure Committee
From: Historic District Commission
Subj: 482 Amherst Street, Country Tavern

Date: September 24, 2019

At the September 23, 2019 regular meeting of the Historic District Commission (HDC), a majority of the
attending members voted to suppor the release of the Facade Easement for the Country Tavern Restaurant, at
452 Amherst Street. The Commissioners are awere that the restaurant is not located in their jurisdiction.

The HDC members were in agrecment of the stipulations that included:

4, $30,000 contribution to the City of Nashua
Exclusive salvage rights to the City of Nashua
An effort ic preserve the mature trees on site
Release of the Facade Hasement

ee
i fhe lh

go . f

( pf ge Q
Robert Sampson, Chairman & .
Historic District Commission

THE CITY OF NASHUA “the Gate City"

Economucs Develooment

To: Scott Leclair, Planning Board Chair
From: Tim Cummings, Director of Economic Development

Ce: Andrew Prolman. Attorney ~ Prunier & Prolman, PA.
Date: September’2019

Re: 452 Amherst Street — Release of Facade Easement

Backeround
Alla Maak Properties. LLC has petitioned to the City io Release the Fagade Easement on 452 Amherst
Street (the Country Tavern Restaurant), The Board of Aldermen’s Infrastructure Committee referred the

petition to the Planning Board of their recommendation.
The Planning Board was previously supplied with the following:

® The NH Division of Historic Resources determination that the Property is NOT eligible for the
National Historic Register,

* Historic Preservationist Lisa Mausolf's Report explaining why the property has little to no
historic value.

* Acted in accordance with the Cin’s Master Plan objectives on Historical Resources. by providing
@ documentation of the history of the structure for the City to be archived in its historical resource
database.

Furthermore, Since the July, 1.2019 Memo from Roger Houston the City, through its Econontic
Development, Community Development and Legal team. have entered into a dialog with the applicant to
discuss a reasonable alternative to simply removing the facade easement from the property thal would be
a win-win for ali involved.

To that end, the parties have worked closely these past few weeks toward an agreement acceptable to the
City and Alla Maak Properties. Our Agreement includes:

: A $50,000.00 contribution to the City
‘ Exclusive salvage rights to the City
‘ An effort to preserve the mature trees an site
. Release of the Facade Easement
Request

Considering that the Property has little tc no historic value, and we have a substantive Agreement in
place, we respectfully request the Board's positive recommendation to the Board of Alderman to release
the Facade Easement.

Auditorium Commission

Keith Weirich (Reappointment)
14 Court Street
Nashua, NH 03060

Cultural Connections Committee

Jessica Gorhan
97 Western Avenue
Henniker, NH 03242

Historic District Commission

William Slivinski
46 Berkeley Street
Nashua, NH 03064

Planning Board

Lawrence Hirsch
12 Salmon Brook Drive
Nashua, NH 03062

APPOINTMENTS BY THE MAYOR

OCTOBER 8, 2019

Term to Expire

Term to Expire

Term to Expire

Term to Expire

| respectfully request that these appointments be confirmed.

Jim Donchess

Mayor

> March 31, 2021

: December 31, 2020

: June 30, 2022

> March 31, 2020

A special meeting of the Board of Aldermen was held Tuesday, September 24, 2019, at 6:45 p.m. in the
Aldermanic Chamber.

President Lori Wilshire presided; City Clerk Susan K. Lovering recorded.

Prayer was offered by City Clerk Susan K. Lovering; Alderman Patricia Klee led in the Pledge
to the Flag.

The roll call was taken with 10 members of the Board of Aldermen present; Alderman Laws, Alderwoman Kelly,
Alderwoman Melizzi-Golja. Alderman Tencza, and Alderman Clemons were recorded absent.

His Honor, Mayor James W. Donchess, and Corporation Counsel Steven A. Bolton were also in attendance.
President Wilshire

Alderwoman Kelly is not feeling well and won’t be joining us this evening and Alderwoman Melizzi-Golja is running
a little late but she will be here.

COMMUNICATIONS

From: Lori Wilshire, President, Board of Aldermen
Re: Special Board of Aldermen Meeting

There being no objection, President Wilshire accepted the communication and placed it on file.

DISCUSSION
Assessing Update.
President Wilshire

We are going to invite the Director of Administrative Services, Ms. Kleiner, to join us and give us an Assessing
Update. Thank you for being here this evening.

Kim Kleiner, Director of Administrative Services

Good evening and thank you for inviting us to update you on all of the improvements that we have made to the
Assessing function. So last we were here, we were here at the end of April and we presented you the
improvement plan which we have been working on hard. Before | begin, if you don’t mind, | would like to
introduce some of the Assessing Staff, who have all joined us here this evening.

President Wilshire

That would be wonderful, thank you.

Special Bd. of Aldermen — 09/24//2019 Page 2

Ms. Kleiner

So if they’d stand: Louise Brown, the Administrative Supervisor; Greg Turgiss, Commercial Assessor; Amanda
Mazerolle, Administrative; Lynn Cameron, Administrative Specialist; Mike Mandle, Residential Assessor, Doug
Dame, Commercial Assessor; Gary Turgiss, Residential Assessor. We also have the three members of the
Board of Assessors with us, Mr. Paul Bergeron, Mr. Bob Earley and Mr. Dan Hansberry, who is currently serving
as Chair.

President Wilshire

Thank you very much, that was nice to meet everyone.

Ms. Kleiner

So without the staff, this would not be possible. So this is their accomplishments and | thank them for putting up
with me every day. So this staffing level has remained the same since April, except we have had Karina Ochoa
join the Administrative Services Office. She is the Administrative Assistant within my office. She not only
provides support to me, but she also provides support to the Department. This summer, we also had a junior
form Nashua Senior High School, Alexandra Pickett. She was part of the Mayor’s Internship Program and she
also assisted the Department. You all know Pam Andruskevich, our GIS Technician, who plays a very
important role in the maintaining of property data through Pictometry and GIS Mapping. Pam has joined us here
this evening as well.

As you know, a few weeks ago we presented a plan here to PEDC on all the important changes that are
happening within GIS. Upon passing of Legislation before you, Assessing will hire a temporary Assessor for 3
to 6 months, part-time, up to $20,000.00. We hope for your consideration in that Legislation this evening; that is
very important to us.

You saw this back in April, this was our Assessing Improvement Mind Map. This laid out for us the areas that
we believed we would touch upon within the Improvement Plan. So | wanted to bring that back because you will
see a number of these areas discussed as we discuss the progress that has been made so far. So we put the
progress into 5 key areas of improvement: Transparency, Customer Service, Efficiency & Data Collection,
Procedures & Communication, Property Data Accuracy and Software Program Applications. There is a
difference which we will explain later on between Property Data Accuracy and the Data Collection piece.

So Transparency within the Department: in case you haven't noticed, our entire Web Site Page has been re-
designed for easier navigation. The popular links button which is a button right at the top in a row of blue
buttons provides additional tools and information added. The Residential Assessment Information Guide that
was provided by KRT, the Understanding NH Property Taxes, Explanation of Your Tax Bill, Understanding of
your Property Card. So we have tried to make information readily available to tax payers to help them
understand the process. We have also provided on-line access to your property card.

This will be updated once a year; the card represents your December Tax Bill. This is the Property Tax Card
that we see within the Assessing Office; this is not the Web Prop Data that you used to see prior. If you want a
current, live property card, for some reason you think changes have been made from the web site you can e-
mail and we will e-mail back a property record card to you with instructions on how to read it.

Special Bd. of Aldermen — 09/24//2019 Page 3

Starting in August we introduced the new newsletter, the Assessing Monitor; issued monthly it will provide a lot
of important dates and deadlines, notices of changes and updates within the Department. We want to make
sure that during the Full Measure & List, we can push as much information to our residents as possible. That
has been included in the RFP for the Full Measure & List and will be very important. Residents can sign up for
this newsletter on the web site and they will receive it by e-mail.

Our Board of Assessor meetings; so now our Board of Assessor meetings are held up in the Auditorium, they
are televised on Channel 16, recorded, available on YouTube, minutes are verbatim and available on the web
site. We also created an e-mail address for members of the public to contact the Board of Assessors, that e-
mail address goes to the entire Board and myself in case there is a staff level inquiry that needs to be
investigated for them. Often that address is not for conversation, it is much like the Board of Aldermen e-mail
address. But it does get to the Board and they can view the resident’s inquiry.

Efficiency & Data Collection: One of the problems that came about was you generally had assessors calling
residents and scheduling their own appointments. So as you can imagine in today’s busy society, they would
call, often get the voicemail and they’d have to leave a message and wait for the resident to call them back. The
resident might call them back; they might be in the field. This kind of created a hold up in creating some of
those appointments. So right now we have the Administrative Staff, mostly Ms. Cameron, scheduling those
appointments. And since she is here in the office, you don’t have that telephone tag. And then the assessors
can worry about getting out into the field and completing their appointments.

As | mentioned earlier, the hiring of the temporary employee before you tonight; why is this important? It is
important because we had an increase in our work load, not really anticipate come this September. So as you
may know, we are working with the Legal Department and preparing a response to the BTLA. We are also
working with the Legal Department on a number of appeals that have been filed with the BTLA and Superior
Court. This takes time, it takes Assessor’s time to be in Legal and to walk them through the files and some of
the data. This really arose, otherwise we would have brought this to you much earlier, but we are hoping that
through the NHAAO List Serve and through contacts that we have with other assessors, that we will be able to
fill this position quickly.

We are holding weekly Assessor Meetings; this Monday — yesterday, we had Director Cummings with us from
Economic Development. We are trying to increase the communication with other Departments that may have
information on development within the City. For instance, Director Cummings would have information on
commercial properties and where they may be in their construction process, so to reach out and to make and
use the information and the contacts that we have within the City to the best of our knowledge is important. We
also discuss properties, consistency of methods, and we have a peer review on different properties and
different assessments.

We have re-instituted an updated sales letter, this is a questionnaire that is sent to residents to request and
verify the details of their sale. Over the summer, over 1,179 have been mailed and 304 have been returned.
Why is this important? Well when we are going through the process of qualifying sales, it is important that we
know what information may have been missed on the property card, what information about the sale and the
property they can provide to us. So that is important and we hope that residents will take the time to fill out the
short survey and return it to us.

We also instituted a letter of assessment change. So when a resident has a change in their assessment over
$20,000.00 due to data corrections, we are sending out a letter to inform them. It has been brought to us that
some members of the public would like to see that changed to a percentage, that is something that we are
looking at.

Special Bd. of Aldermen — 09/24//2019 Page 4

But for the time being, we have letters this year that have gone out for the $20,000.00 and we are going to
maintain that for now.

Research of Best Practices and Consulting; so as many of you know, there was $50,000.00 included in the
budget in Assessing for consulting. This was important especially when we eliminated the Chief Assessor job.
We are taking use of those funds. We are consulting with David Cornell, who is an Assessing Expert. He has
been extremely helpful and very knowledgeable. | have to say that Assessing is a very special field, itis
amazing how knowledgeable and how helpful assessors from different communities have been. They have
reached out to let us know that they are there if we have any technical questions. They have provided their
contact information to us. We have taken use of that a few times. We are also, in the Legislation before you,
have the request for some tablets. Why the tablets are important is that this is going to create efficiency within
the Department. We will load the new AssessPro5 Software on to the tablets. This will allow assessors to make
real-time changes to our system right out in the field. So currently, they have a property card, it is written, they
make changes and they write them down, they bring them back and either they enter them into the system or
the administrative staff helps and enters them into the system. So the changes that we can just incorporate right
there in the field will provide efficiency.

We also have a number of different areas where we are looking at efficiency now. We are looking at the
property cards as we move to AP5 and we are trying to figure out what information needs to be added to the
card, what information needs to maybe be removed from the card because it is not useful to the tax payers but it
still needs to be seen by the assessors. So we are making those types of changes. We also have a property
card revision notification, so we include the property card in the mailing to residents when an abatement is either
approved or denied by the Board of Assessors. This allows them to look at the property card and see if any
data corrections have been made during that process or to question maybe why the denial or the approval has
been made. That was not done prior; prior they just received a letter.

Procedures and Communication; so in addition to the weekly assessor meetings, we also have a weekly
meeting with all staff members. We review data, we review work load, we review procedures, changes in
policies or directives, just general information that all of the staff needs to know. These are important and these
weren't being done and this was an issue that we brought up during the Management Audit. You need to have
widespread communication within any function. They have been very useful. There have been times, | will
admit, especially during the abatement process in July, that the abatements took first slot and we actually had to
postpone some of our weekly staff meetings because the assessors had appointments and needed to be out in
the field. So during July, we did a lot of catch up and passing information from word of mouth but those
abatements had to be done and that was our priority.

| am also providing departmental updates to the Board of Assessors at each meeting. These are generally in
writing. | think | may have shared a couple of them with the Board of Aldermen especially when it was talking
about the number of abatements and things that we were having. But of course you can find them in the review
of minutes from the Board of Assessor’s meeting. The Board of Assessors are currently undergoing a review of
their By-Laws. So as you know, we had the appointment by Mayor Donchess of Mr. Bergeron this summer and
after he joined the Board, they began reviewing their bylaws and they are currently in that process.

It has been asked how there is any control of assessment changes within the Department; what type of review
and audit is being undertaken? So there is a report, it’s called Assessment Audit Report and both Louise Brown
and | have access to that and we run that periodically. | am informed of assessment changes over $20,000.00
as | said, we have these weekly assessor meetings, we discuss large cases. But! also run these audit logs and
| review those and what do they tell me? They tell me the change that’s been made to any building, the change
that’s been made to any land, and the change in total. So if | have questions, if any of those look like | need to
inquire on further information | do and the Assessors walk me through those changes.

Board of Aldermen Page 11
April 26, 2016

time when we need to use the mechanisms that we have in place because things are at a point where we have
no control over them. This being the pension costs coming down to us from the State of New Hampshire. |
look back as a taxpayer who has owned property in Nashua since 2007; multiple properties, and | think to
myself that | have paid in to this pension cost, my tax paying has gone into this and the reason we have set it
aside is because we knew that some of these costs were going to be a burden to us later on down the road. |
also look at it from a taxpayer perspective as we have the spending cap and in years past we have not gone
over it but have been under it. When | combine the fact that we’ve had millions of dollars of savings over the
course of the last twenty years because this Board has done the prudent thing and kept the budget under the
spending cap, | look at this situation and | say to myself why wouldn’t we, at this point, spend the money that
we've put aside so that I, as a taxpayer, don’t have to worry about the fact that $350,000 extra is going to go
just to pensions instead of maybe going to the schools or the fire department or the police department or any
number of city services that we pay hard earned money for. | look at this situation as it’s been a long time
coming and we are now at the point where we need to say this is the year that the spending cap has to be
overridden because we have costs from the state that are mandated to us that we have no control over and we
have to pay. We can either pay the money from the taxpayer's money that we put aside or we can spend the
money from the taxpayers that we are going to collect from them next year and leave the money that we
already have aside. | think we ought to spend the money that we already have instead of taxing people in the
future for these costs.

Alderman Moriarty

We could debate whether this principle and interest exclusion is equivalent to a spending cap override. By
virtue of the fact that it requires ten votes, implies that it essentially has the same mathematical equivalent as a
spending cap override. To blame the financial challenges that we have on the existence of the spending cap is
somewhat like blaming the speed limit for being tardy to an appointment that we knew about well in advance.
Four years ago when | joined the Board of Aldermen | could foresee these challenges ahead of us and I’ve
been voting accordingly and tonight | am going to continue to vote the same way and vote no on this item.

Alderman Siegel

Nobody is blaming the spending cap on anything. None of the discussion blamed the spending cap. In fact,
my reference was a flaw in the way the spending cap Charter legislation works in that it doesn’t allow me to
ratchet back the number. The flaw is wooh’s me there’s a spending cap, the flaw is gee, it would be nice if
there was a tool that was even friendly to the taxpayer to allow me to do this and still ratchet it back. | think
that characterization is just false. | have an idea, my plan B, to hopefully address some of the concerns. It
seems to me that the biggest concern is the bump in the cap and the possibility of that being filled up by
promises made that have nothing to do with my purpose in this legislation. It’s so frustrating for me. | feel like
the intent of this has been diluted by this idea that somehow oh, we made all these promises and this is the
only way we can do this, like that was the intention. When | was thinking about this | didn’t hear about any
promises or anything. This is strictly intended to deal with the downshift in the pension cost. The plan B | have
is to take the effective problem which is to say we are taking that one lump money and we are putting it all at
once into the trust fund and that has the unfortunate side effect of bumping everything up by that amount. The
trust fund is set up right now to be available in thirds over three years so the plan B, and I’ve actually hand
changed the legislation but it wouldn’t be appropriate to have all of those legislation changes at the full Board,
is to say okay, how about we take the one third and set that aside as the kicker because it doesn’t have the
type of dramatic bump in the cap number and it hopefully reinforces the notion that this is not intended to be
everybody’s saving grace to get some magical contract approval, that’s not the point. This is a change that we
could actually fairly easily make. Again, | wouldn’t do it at the Board level, we would have to send it back to
budget where it could be properly vetted and I’d certainly like to pass it by CFO Griffin to see if | haven’t missed
anything while | was editing it today. | went over the legislation point by point to see if this was feasible and it
appeared to be. | am hoping that for those who have objected to the raise in the ceiling that this is something
that maybe would say okay, I’d be willing to consider that because it’s hopefully more clearly for a purpose.
These are not contracts you can slip in under that cap number and we could work with it that way. I’m not sure
that we have enough people comfortable with the arguments that were made to pass this and I’m concerned

Special Bd. of Aldermen — 09/24//2019 Page 5

You may have heard of a procedure manual that was just introduced to the Board of Assessors in September.
It was reviewed by David Cornell, our Assessing Expert. | stated during the meeting at the Board of Assessors
that this was a live document and it will be amended. So with the new AssessProd5 Software, there will be a
number of changes required and one of the changes that was specified in the Management Audit Report was
the moving away from the EYB or Effective Year Built for depreciation. We brought that up, it was a
recommendation in the Management Audit Report, it is a discussion that we are currently having with Patriot
Properties and it is included in the RFP for the Full Measure & List.

| did not want to undertake changes to a procedure manual when | know that this is going to be addressed in the
Full Measure & List. The current policy is as is, we did not revise the policy for the EYB or for the Grade &
Conditions to the bathrooms and the kitchens; that will be all handled then. We also continue to consult with
David Cornell on best practices and changes will be made to the manual as we find best practices not only
suggested by he but other communities that we are talking with.

We are undergoing rotating attendance at the NH AAO meetings by Assessors. This provides them continuous
education. There is an education portion of those meetings. This part month, Mr. Turgiss and | attended and
the education session was on utility valuation and that was given by Scott Bartlett. So as they hold their
meetings each month, we will rotate the assessors so that all the assessors have a chance to get this
information, bring it back to our weekly assessors meetings and discuss it and share it with all.

We have binders that we have created for the Board of Assessor meetings. Assessing is an interesting function
because it is very paper dependent. There is a large amount of paper that is processed through the Assessing
Department. So you can imagine when you have 40 abatements going to the Board of Assessors for
consideration and it is a bunch of loose papers or papers that are just paper-clipped. They are trying to get
through this big packet and they are trying to have residents join them. We felt that there just needed to be
some organization provided for them to assist them. And also | will admit it assists me in following the meeting
and now we are doing one for the legal representative that is at that meeting as well and one for staff to share. It
does, it has helped very much with the flow and the organization of the meeting. They take relatively little time
to produce. These are also done and used for actually where | got the idea was the Board of Public Works
binders. | think that organization and having a good flow of the meeting is important, especially when it is
televised and we want to make sure that things aren’t omitted or missed. In July when we had all the
abatements was probably when it took the most time to prepare these binders. Normally, half an hour tops to
create these binders for a normal meeting. But they are extremely helpful.

During the Management Audit we discussed the lack of mileage reporting and we had stated back then that this
had already been looked at and had been addressed. This continues, the assessors fill out a mileage report,
they attach their field log, it is required by all assessors; it is reviewed and approved by myself. | also receive all
of the schedules that are created by the Administrative Staff and | can always compare against those schedules
as well.

Property Data Accuracy: By far this is one of the most important things that | could discuss tonight with you. We
have a request for proposals currently out there. That request was posted on August 29". On September 5",
we hold a pre-proposal meeting, this was non-mandatory. We had two firms attend; Vision Government
Solutions and Tyler Technologies. On September 9" was the deadline for any questions to be submitted to the
City and on September 11" we posted any answers to those questions. This Thursday responses are due to
the City by 3:00 P.M. | can tell you to date, as of this morning, none had been received so we are hoping that
everyone is waiting until the last moment. We have put together a team to review the proposals that are
submitted, we are including Purchasing, members of Assessing, CFO Griffin, Director Cummings, Celia
Leonard, to review this proposals.