A regular meeting of the Board of Aldermen was held Tuesday, August 9, 2022, at 7:30 p.m. in the aldermanic chamber
and via Zoom teleconference which meeting link can be found on the agenda and on the City’s website calendar.
President Lori Wilshire presided; City Clerk Daniel Healey recorded.
President Wilshire
I'd like to welcome our new City Clerk Dan Healey. Thank you for being here tonight. Welcome.
Prayer was offered by City Clerk Daniel Healey; Alderman Thomas Lopez led in the Pledge to the Flag.
Let’s start the meeting by taking a roll call attendance. If you are participating via Zoom, please state your presence, reason
for not attending the meeting in person, and whether there is anyone in the room with you during this meeting, which is
required under the Right-To-Know Law.
The roll call was taken with 13 members of the Board of Aldermen present: Alderman O’Brien, Alderman Sullivan,
Alderman Klee, Alderman Moran, Alderman Lopez, Alderman Jette, Alderman Clemons, Alderwoman Kelly, Alderman
Dowd, Alderman Caron, Alderman Thibeault, Alderwoman Timmons, Alderman Wilshire.
Alderman Comeau and Alderman Gouveia were recorded absent.
Mayor James W. Donchess, Corporation Counsel Steve Bolton, were also in attendance.
REMARKS BY THE MAYOR
Mayor Donchess
Yes, Madam President. Well first, | wanted to join you in welcoming City Clerk Healey to our meeting. We're fortunate to
have him and I'm looking forward, of course, to working with him over the years.
Madam President | wanted to say that the city, and | think most of the Aldermen know about this, the city's AAA bond
rating was reaffirmed by Standard and Poor recently. They cited many good qualities about the city - our economy,
residents, but also our strong financial performance, and conservative money management practices. So | want to
congratulate John Griffin, CFO/City Treasurer and our financial staff for helping us achieve that distinction.
Paul Sullivan now is the Chief Assessor for the city. He has extensive experience in Massachusetts in Brockton where he
worked, | think, 15 years as well as in Avon, which is a smaller community. He's looking forward to the work to be done
here. We will make sure that he comes in to meet you sometime in the very near future.
Next Madam President, | wanted to mention something that we or the congressional delegation Region One of EPA
announced yesterday they have awarded the Nashua Regional Planning Commission $500,000 of brownfields funds.
These are funds which are used to investigate, usually investigate, and to some extent cleanup environmental issues that
are not so severe to be a superfund site but which impair the ability to build on or develop a particular parcel of land. This
is important because we have the NIMCO site, which we now actually own after many years of litigation. We are going to
be asking the Regional Planning Commission to allocate some of those funds to help us do further assessment on that
building. They have allocated $25,000 of brownfield funds in the past to do Phase 1 and 2 environmental studies but
more work needs to be done to assess the cost of cleanup and clearing the site.
And finally Madam President, | wanted to mention to you and the Board of Aldermen an interesting project that Public
Works is involved in with a local company. You may know or maybe not, a company GSSI on Simon Street. They are a
company that employs about 70 people, and their expertise, and they're highly technical - their expertise is developing
equipment that uses radar to look below the surface of something. It could be asphalt, concrete in a construction site, it
can be an archaeological site, can be a polar cap, many different applications. They do have currently equipment that can
after the fact, after pavement is laid down, measure the “compaction” it's called of pavement. A slight difference in
compaction. The difference between say 91% and 96% can mean a great deal in terms of how long the asphalt lasts,
how long the pavement stays down. So what they are trying to develop is, and they’re well along with it, is a piece of
equipment that you can mount on a roller so that the operator of the roller can determine in real time by looking at a
screen what the level of compaction is of the asphalt that the operator is rolling. In using that application if they saw that
well it's, you know, it's 91%, they might do a little more and make it 95.
