Special Board of Aldermen 07-01-2021 Page 29
When people who are serving in the State Legislature and do not live in Nashua take it upon themselves to
modify our spending cap against the opposition of all of our elected officials that were sent to the house and
using parliamentary tricks and maneuvers in order to achieve it, that is discouraging. It speaks to their
moral character, it speaks to their credibility of their ideals and it is definitely not going to reflect in how
effective their overall government is. If your platform politically has to be, | am going to sabotage other
people to make them look bad so that | can look good by comparison, you are not doing anything other
than tearing things down. So! applaud my fellow aldermen who have been focused during their terms here
on building the City of Nashua up, being an inclusive place, being a welcoming City, working on
development and forward thinking and creative ways to be economically responsible to be fiscally
responsible to build the tax base and to grow a City that | think we are all proud of. So thank you
everybody.
Alderman Jette
Thank you Madam President. So | want to thank my fellow aldermen for pointing out various areas in my
way of thinking about trying to support the Mayor in reducing the Police and Fire budgets. | hope that with
4" of July coming, you know, | hope the Police still respond to complaints from Ward 5 about fireworks in
spite of what | said tonight. And if there are any fires, | hope the Fire Department comes and doesn’t cross
our Ward off the list. We don’t have a Fire Station in Ward 5 so | hope that doesn’t deter them from
responding if necessary.
We all do what we think is best in the interest of the City and even though we disagreed on these issues, |
appreciated your statements and your sentiments and in the end we all voted for the budget. So thank you.
Alderman Schmidt
Thank you Madam President. I’d like to thank the Mayor for the budget. | think he helped produce a nice
tight budget and it was pretty amazing to see what happened. Thank you very much. | also wanted to
thank the leadership of Alderman Dowd on our Committee. The work he has done on this, nobody
understands how much he does to help create a terrific budget. Thank you very much. One more point |
wanted to make, | was watching the Board of Education the other day and at the end of it, Sandra Ziehm
took a moment to talk about the people who had come to complain about various things. That day it was
just about masks and she said, when we sit up here, we do a lot more than you would ever know. We pay
attention to every aspect that we need to. You may come here just to talk about masks but that’s a tiny part
and we'd really like you to understand if you want to be part of what happens, you need more than just one
issue. You really need to think about the entire job that we do. | thanked her for that because | don’t think a
lot of people realize that it is a big issue to talk about the budget but golly, you know, making sure
somebody’s stop sign gets put in place is really important to a lot of people too. And it is a terrific job that
we get to do to protect the citizens that we serve. We are public servants after all, this is a terrific job and
when | hear complaints about how we are doing so poorly | just have to shake my head and think about
Sandra Ziehm and thank her very much for making the point. Just one more thing, the people who were at
the meeting that day, there was a lot of anger and there was a gentleman there who was standing up in the
back with his arms crossed and you could feel that it was unpleasant and that shouldn’t happen, that’s a
business meeting. If there are comments that you need to make, you make a comment, we do that here.
And when your comments are done, the business goes on. And | am really very grateful for how this Board
manages that. And | think the Board of Education is under a little stress right now and we need to support
people who are working on it. Thank you very much.
Alderman Cleaver
Thank you Madam President. Alderman Schmidt took one of my words but | want to express my
appreciation to the Mayor and all the Department Heads for an outstanding job in the budget process and
especially also to Chairman Dowd and the Budget Committee for an outstanding job; very, very well done,
many, many hours of work to do that and to get to where we are right now. And also lastly | would like to
wish everybody a very safe and happy 4" of July.
