Special Board of Aldermen 07-06-2021 Page 6
Chairman Caron
Dr. Storace would you like to speak concerning this piece of legislation to expand the Board of Health
Commission?
Dr. Anthony Storace
Yes please. You know me, I’m not a great public speaker. It’s not my forte so I’ve written things down in
notes and | hope you can accept my apology for such. Also when | came on the Board of Health | didn’t
have reading glasses and | now do. | would like to say I’m speaking for all the members of the Nashua
Board of Health and have Dr. Chuck and Dr. Stephanie’s permission to do. Each and every one of us are
not in favor of this proposal. We do not support the opinions presented by the proposer regarding
members not being able to make meetings, having to postpone vital votes, or not having the time to commit
to the Board of Health and the best interests of the City of Nashua.
| would like to say — I'll leave the rest of that maybe for a little bit later and just kind of go down the things
that | think are the pros of the Board as is. Current size works perfectly. It allows for better productivity and
actually a quick response and therefore I’m in disagreement with Tom on that. Smaller boards can do that.
Larger boards can’t. The current doctors are focused and committee. They’re a great compliment to each
other resulting in different opinions, deep thought, and robust discussions. They work well together along
with the City health teams. The doctors have a high level of trust of each other and they health teams that
support us. There is no personal or political bias. Each team member has a specific role that compliments
the team. We play well off of each other and we play well with each other. We are war harden.
What we saw last year would be down any professional, any person for that matter. None of us has seen
this before — education. Private practice, or Public health and | hope we never see it again. But it’s not
over. We're seeing the action from the variants and you may recall my words when we lifted the masks —
the variants were what scared me at that time the most.
What we believe are against this. We don’t need to change and compliment matters. Believe it or not, it’s
hard to find professionals to serve time and commit. My 25 years on the Board, we’ve asked many people
and some of them would have loved to but they just can’t do it. Five is a harder number to integrate. I’ve
served on many committees throughout my years and | can tell you there is a reason why we have
subcommittees of larger committees — it’s to get more work done, and we get that work done, and we work
well together, and we trust each other, and we trust the people around us. If | have to know something, my
go to people are Bobbie, any one of the members of the Public Health, and each one of the doctors that |
have.
We feel that there is no need to break up the team. We weren’t consulted on this. Period. You need to
know that this was an e-mail sent to us one hour before the Board of Health meeting and off it went. | think
if Tom had spent the time to sit down with us and talk with us, | think he would see this a little bit differently.
One of the things that we have that’s unique in our group is we have people that kind of are out go to
people that can sit in the meeting because all meetings are open to the public anyway but they just don’t
vote on the Board. I'll give you an example. Dr. Alex he was our infectious disease doc. Immensely
important over this pandemic. He gave us comment. He asked questions, gave us answers, but he
doesn’t vote on the Board and that could be the same with any other person and still expand our
capabilities but at the same time keep things kind of close.
| apologize for even being here. | think if we had sat down and gone over this prior to this meeting, there
would be no need to take up the aldermanic time. Thank you.
