Special Board of Aldermen 06-21-2021 Page 2
Again, I'll be going by division. I’m going at the beginning to mention which departments are in that
division. You can ask a question on any one of the departments within that division. Before we get started
on going through the budget, the Mayor would like to do a brief overview on the FY22 budget. Mayor
Donchess.
Mayor Jim Donchess
All right well thank you very much Mr. Chair and thank you all for attending our public hearing on the Fiscal
2022 budget. So as usual, I’m going to just recap a few things that have occurred during Fiscal 2021 and
then talk about the proposed budget.
So we will go to slide #1. Just to recap some of the things which occurred during 2021 which we all know
was quite a year. We of course the City had our COVID-19 response. Public Health took the lead there.
They did from the beginning contact tracing. Many individuals who contracted COVID-19 were treated and
counseled by Public Health. They reached out to many, many people and people worked 7 days a week
really for along time. They did an extremely good job. During the course of the time up to now, they’ve
done about 7,300 COVID-19 tests at clinics — outdoors and indoors throughout the City. Some at the Elm
Street parking garage, some on the depth of winter.
More recently, the Public Health Department has been involved in administering 18,000 doses. Of course
the lead response is by the State of New Hampshire so these 18,000 doses are for people who are more
difficult to reach and have not come to the clinics held by the State of New Hampshire at Nashua South, at
the mall, and elsewhere. For example, the Public Health nurses have gone to picnics at Greeley Park and
talk to people. If they decide that they’d like to have a vaccination, a dose, they do it there. So there are
many community events that they have attended and will continue to attend throughout the summer and
the remainder of the year.
During the course of the pandemic, the city continued to provide all city services. Some of those in person.
Some remote. Of course City Hall where we had several outbreaks of COVID was remote for some period
of time but then earlier this month, we opened City Hall and we were running by appointments for vehicle
registration and other reasons for quite a time. But then earlier this month, we opened City Hall to visitors.
We have asked people especially those not vaccinated to consider wearing a mask but there’s no
requirement.
We did do City Hall renovations designed to make the building more COVID resistant, make it more
disease resistant in general, and to try to address any future pandemics that we may have. To do that, we
used a little over $1 million in federal or so-called GOFFR funds which were federal funds allocated through
the State of New Hampshire. Significant renovations were done in the automobile registration area, in the
Assessing area, and in the tax area. If you visit now, you will see that the work is going on at the City
Clerk’s area and that should be done within a few weeks. The departments when the work was going on
moved up to the third floor. That’s where the City Clerk and her staff are now.
One thing that we focused on is in an effort to try to save money because over the period of two years
healthcare costs went up $6 million or around 20 percent in just two years. That’s over Fiscal 2020 and
2021. That trend seemed like it would continue. That $6 million increase equates to a 3 percent tax
increase so we really wanted to address that rising cost. So Administrative Services and others worked to
develop a new HMO plan which has been agreed to by a whole group of employee groups as well as
implemented in City Hall. That has saved us about $1 million over what healthcare costs would be for those
six groups were it not for the revised HMO plan.
Other things that have occurred during 2021, we continue the paving plan of action. We paved 26 miles of
streets out of the 300 that the city has. We did about 20 miles of crack sealing. This is a much less
expensive way of preserving streets which is much less expensive. It doesn’t certainly last as long as
repaving but it can preserve a street for five years or a little longer at a much lower cost. The idea there is
to preserve streets until we can get to paving them. So far after we’re through this paving season, we will
have paved under the paving plan of action about 125 miles of streets and many miles of the crack sealing.
