Board of Aldermen 5-26-2020 Page 27
Attorney Bolton
| don’t think you would be fooling the American Civil Liberties Union or a Federal District Court Judge at all.
It’s not so much this time, it is what happens next time, when a Jewish Organization is turned down, or a
Hindu Organization is turned down, or a Muslim Organization is turned down. That’s what | would be worried
about. | don’t think some kind of short window just to allow Bishop Guertin to do it is going to fool anybody.
Alderman Jette
OK follow up. I’ve never had any good experience fooling a Federal Judge and | don’t want to try now. | just
want to answer some of things, some of my fellow Aldermen may have misunderstood what | was saying
about the Fire Marshall, not having the discretion to turn anyone down, other than if he feels that what they
are proposing is unsafe. | understand the Fire Department, you know Chief Rhodes, you know | understand
how seriously they take the safety and that’s not the issue. The issue is that generally speaking this
Ordinance the issue that people, | think, a lot of people don’t like the noise. It’s the noise that is the problem.
| am sure that the Fire Marshall will make sure that any display complies with all of the safety rules, it’s the
noise that irritates people. And when Chief Rhodes talked about how this would be limited because
organizations cannot afford the insurance, | want to point out to him that the insurance policy that is being
provided in this instance is being provided by the fireworks company, not Bishop Guertin, it’s the fireworks
company that has submitted the Certificate of Insurance to cover the insurance. That fireworks company,
you know, they have insurance in place, and they would be able to issue that same Certificate of Insurance
for as many organizations that area willing to pay them to put on a fireworks display.
| just think that the problem with this is that there are a lot of questions. | like the idea of some of my fellow
Aldermen talked about, you know, let’s bring this back to Committee and fully vet it, but we will allow it to go
head to allow Bishop Guertin. I’m just, that doesn’t take into account that citizens in that neighborhood, that
surround Bishop Guertin, we don’t know, hopefully they are all looking forward to this show if they know
about it. They probably don’t know anything about it. We didn’t know about this until this afternoon. So |
doubt that the people in that neighborhood, | would love to learn that Bishop Guertin itself went around and
talked to the neighbors and told them about their plans and asked them what their reaction was. | would
love to hear that. But right now, | don’t know that, | don’t know how the neighbors feel about this. And | just
think it is a bad precedent which just files in the face of a number of years of policy that we’ve had in Nashua
about fireworks displays and fireworks shows. So | still can’t vote for it, thank you.
Alderman Lopez
Well just in respect to the comments that just made, since we are the ones granting a permit in theory here,
it would probably be appropriate for the City to alert using the Emergency Alert System or some kind of
mechanism to inform residents that this is going on. Because you don’t want to startle them, but it’s also an
8-minute show. | think if people had a little bit of warning, they could probably endure it. | had a question to
Attorney Bolton; do you happen to know if Bishop Guertin is a 501(c)3?
Attorney Bolton
| don’t know that. | think they are probably exempt from taxes under other provisions of the law. But! don’t
know.
Alderman Lopez
| just had the idea that we maybe we could limit this to 501(c)3, that way we sidestep the whole religious
organization angle. But in a practical sense, trying to find out if they are a 501(C)3, doing all that in a week
is not likely to happen. So just an idea.
