Board of Aldermen 2-06-2020 Page 25
It has also been touched upon tonight the extent to which the City of Nashua has followed through with some of
the other recommendation and met the need of the broad artists community. | am very happy to see the
establishment of a set of artist studios at Court Street, attention and investment in the Court Street facility to the
benefit of the users there and a great deal of consideration when looking at the future of Keefe Auditorium.
Again we are in favor of this and we appreciate all the hard work that has gone into it and thank you all.
TESTIMONY IN OPPOSITION
Ken Siegel 2224 Parker Street Lowell, this will be less than 60 seconds Mr. Chairman. Very quickly, | was the
one that came up with the 2 year threshold. | am fairly confident that | know where it came from so | have to
take issue with Mr. Lannan’s characterization that implied that is somehow capricious or arbitrary; it was neither
and it was based on a discussion that | had as | said before. Again reiterate | believe you should keep some
sort of deadline in there.
Separate from that | believe that to solve the problem of the Aldermen being unaware of the funding, | would
suggest to the President, Alderman Wilshire, go into closed session. We've done it a million times, go into
closed session and you can provide all the information necessary, the Aldermen are bound to secrecy and then
you can make an intelligent vote. | frankly wouldn’t vote on anything of this magnitude without having a fairly
clear cut idea of what the funding situation is. Thank you.
Mike Soucy 3 Roseann Circle. | am going to take less time than my former Alderman friend Ken Siegel. | am
absolutely in favor of the closed session. Please do it, you'll have the facts that you need.
Laurie Ortolano Berkeley Street, I’ll be quick as well. A lot of interesting information came out here tonight, a
lot of timelines and frames. | would request that in the future, you have a spec sheet or a document that’s on
the table for the public to show where we started and where we are now with a breakdown of the finances that
have gone into this project. | mentioned that before when we did the school project and | think we are missing
a lot of information as the public to be able to track what is going on. Some of us can’t dig it all up ourselves,
and we are busy and it would be super helpful if you would provide that tracking mechanism.
Karen Bill 95 Parnell Place, Nashua. | don’t know how you can allow this to go forward as a governing body
how you could even vote to extend it because it was voted on with 155 people, the vote won by 155. You know
there were 551 people in that election that did not vote on Resolution #2. | did hours’ worth of homework
investigating this. 551 didn’t even vote on Resolution #2. Why? | had to ask myself why. You read it and you
know you might be a person that says, “I don’t get this” or “I’m a little older’ or “Ill never go to the Performing Art
Center’. | have not voted on a Resolution before because | didn’t understand the wording and | am an
intelligent individual. So 551 registered voters didn’t even answer the question. And the people that voted in
favor were again led to believe there was $4 million bucks out there and in 2 years it could be done. It didn’t
happen.
You can’t have a moving target of we are just going to move it, we are going to move, we are going to move it.
Are you going to two more years? Are you going to do three years? Because nobody is going to want an
open-ended end to the money. And the money, the money, how much more money? This guy, every meeting
with a calculator. | don’t think we have all the information by far. | don’t think we have accurate information by
far. | don’t think we have a true cost by far. | don’t care if you have if you have 30 people in line to donate, they
are in line, the money is not on the table. You cannot have this go forward. | think that you, | don’t know your
name, let the voters decide. How can you do anything but with a new budget, with a firm deadline and with
reality. Because shame on us for even going forward not knowing what had to be done until a year, year and a
half in. It doesn’t fly. Thank you.
Gordon Jackson | didn’t get to add these couple of points here and this comes directly on what we are
speaking of this evening and the study that is going full circle, the Capital Campaign Feasibility study and just
several comments in this that popped out because they used as the basis, they interviewed | think it was 30 to
35 leading, key word — leading members of the community, business so forth and so on. And they interviewed
them about what they thought this whole process was doing.
