Finance Committee — 01/19/2022 Page 3
you could share at the meeting and so on. Unless | think it’s something controversy, | agree because they come here,
and they come to every meeting, and then they come to the Board of Aldermen, and every night our staff are at our
meetings. | agree with you unless others have a severe objection to it.
Alderman Jette
So when | first think about this, it sounds like a good idea. | happened to be watching some other cities councils and
Board of Aldermen and | noticed that some of them — | think it was Manchester. I’m not positive about that but a lot of
these items they have what’s a called a “consent agenda”. So all the items are listed like they are for us. We get
advanced notice of all of these things and in Manchester the Mayor presides over the Board of Aldermen. She says
something to the effect of okay you’ve all seen the consent agenda. Is there any objection to it? If there’s no objection,
they just pass it. They pass all the items at once. If there is an objection, then they take whatever item is objected to,
they take that out and they pass the rest of them and then the one that’s objected to, they treat individually and hear
discussion about it, explanations, or whatever. | thought from the point of view of economy, and efficiency, and time
management, it seems like a good way of doing things.
On the other hand even before | became an Alderman when | would watch meetings, | would be disappointed when things
were dealt with with such haste. | thought to myself gee | have no idea what that was about. What happened there? So
we as Aldermen of course we get to know these things. We become intimate with them, with the details, and of course it
goes before a committee. There’s a committee discussion but if the public just tunes into the one meeting, they're really
not aware. I’m kind of conflicted as to how important is it to inform the public about what we’re doing or is it up to the
public to research it themselves. I’m not sure where | come down on that.
The other thought | had is that most of us on this Committee are new, except for Alderman Klee. We’re kind of feeling our
way through this right now and | don’t know if you’re prepared to do this tonight but it would be good for us to get a little bit
of a primer on what is the Finance Committee, what are our responsibilities, how closely are we supposed to look at these
things? Like the Record of Expenditures for example. It’s a long list of items and we’re brand new to the Committee. We
just got that last week. I’m wondering if it might not be a good idea to give us a couple of meetings to get our feet wet and
get an understanding of what our responsibilities are and revisit this issue after that.
Mayor Donchess
Yes, that’s fine. I’m not trying to cut out discussion. I’m just trying to reach a happy medium between the previous
approach where staff never came, you never met them, and the staff is here on every item. Sometimes these agendas
are fairly long. Maybe we should follow Alderman Jette’s suggestion and go through a couple of meetings so you can get
a sense of what’s going on.
Alderman Klee
Thank you Mr. Mayor. Alderman Jette can | ask, that wasn’t at a Finance Committee was it that they did a consensus?
Alderman Jette
It was the full board.
Alderman Klee
The full board, yes. In the State House if something passes a committee no less than one dissenting — well actually two
dissenting, it can go onto what we call the “committee of conference” or just, I’m sorry, the consent calendar and then we
just do one vote. That’s because we have thousands. | would not want to do that because this is where all the work
should be done. | would never want to see it happen here. I’m not even sure I'd want to see it happen on a Board of
Aldermen simply because | think that we’re only 5 or 6 versus 15. | think especially with the new Board. | agree that
maybe at the beginning we should bring the staff on but | think just like the 7 or 6:30 type thing, maybe revisit it in a six
month period or something when people feel a little bit more comfortable.
Mayor Donchess
Now in terms of what is the Finance Committee. So most cites don’t have Finance Committees. These are all budgeted
items. So there’s money behind all of this, right. So all the department is doing is spending money according to the
budget. So in most cities, the departments have the right to just proceed given that they’ve already been appropriated the
money to do these things. In the Nashua City Charter, there is a requirement that the Finance Committee — and this is a
