Board of Aldermen 6-23-2020 Page 10
Alderman Klee
Thank you, Madam President. | guess my question would be to the Mayor. | want to see as much life
downtown as possible with everything that we are doing. My concern is when we cancel fireworks and we
are not opening the polls and we are not doing all these other things because of COVID, yet we would be
promoting some type of dancing where people are going to be exhaling. While | do appreciate that we
probably can try to do as much social distancing as possible, is it realistic, | guess is my question. And |
am sure that the Mayor or anybody doesn’t really know that answer. But | wanted to ask when would this
be scheduled for us to do this particular event?
Mayor Donchess
Well as you’ve suggested, we want to be safe and sensible about this, so | can’t really say when exactly we
would do it. We were planning to begin in June, obviously that didn’t happen. We would need to wait to
see how conditions evolve. And if it seems like it could be done in a safe, sensible manner under the
conditions that we face at the time, then we would proceed, if not, we wouldn’t. We have seen, but | agree
with your concern about safety, no question about it. But we have seen some significant progress in the
last couple of weeks — well the last 6 or 8 weeks with the decline in positive tests in New Hampshire. And
then in Massachusetts there have been dramatic changes in the last few weeks where they are down to
1.3% or something like that, 1.5% positive tests, | mean they are way down.
So clearly in this part of New England we are making progress against the disease, but still we have to be
careful and we would definitely work with Public Health with the medical people in deciding whether and
how to proceed.
Alderman Klee
May | have a follow up question.
President Wilshire
Yes.
Alderman Klee
| guess my next kind of like roll into a couple of questions; what is the lead time that they would need to be
able to have this contract in order to get moving forward with some kind of decision. | understand that it’s
the TIF money. Are you saying that it definitely could be the TIF money, | guess would be my question and
they don’t need a whole lot of lead time, would it be better to just kind of hold off making this decision until
we had a better indication as to how things are going. | agree with you all the numbers are going — New
England is looking great. | just have anxiety that if we do something such as this we are going to be seeing
numbers going up, maybe just here in Nashua or people who that are coming to it. | think this will bring
people from other areas beyond Nashua. So | guess my question is, is this something we could put off and
is it definitely coming out of TIF Fund. And it’s not the money as much as it the health.
Mayor Donchess
TIF Funds definitely, that’s the source of funds. So it doesn’t hit the tax rate. We think late August, early
September is the earliest this could go but maybe it would be in the Fall as well. So Public Health is
looking carefully at each of the alternatives we are considering for anything, you know, pools, where we are
not sure we can keep kids apart. So, so far the decision has been to keep the pools closed, but in a
situation like this, where a late summer, early fall we may have much better health conditions where we are
dealing with adults, it may be possible to safely run the event. But we would not, again, do this except in
consultation with Public Health.
