Special Board of Aldermen 6-13-2022 Page 11
The good news is eventually it gets paid back because if you don’t spend it, it’s there. It doesn’t just go to the general
fund. It has to be either transferred to another capital project which the Aldermen find necessary to do or it gets paid
back to retire the payments on those bonds - retire that debt or a portion of it. So it’s not a waste and assuming
there’s no theft or misappropriation involved, it effectively lowers to the extent it’s not needed and never spent it
lowers taxes in the future.
Alderman Klee
Thank you Madam President. This conversation to somewhat does frustrate me a little as a State Rep. | worked very
hard to get the language of the State to become and change SB52 to allow for Nashua override. The only
municipality in the entire State that does not have that and sadly many residents from Nashua came and spoke and
as well as a certain Senator and so on. So it did not happen. The clear question here - | shouldn’t say that. | should
make a statement is that the spending cap is not the same thing as a tax cap. Just because we have a spending cap
does not mean that the taxes won’t go up. People conflate the two things. | know logic says if | don’t spend a lot of
money, then | don’t need a lot of money and so on. | disagree that grants should be excluded. Grants are still
expenditures. It may be free money and in end we may look at it and say it was a wash, money coming in and money
going out but how is that different from any other revenue source that we have? If we can get enough money ina
particular revenue source, why shouldn’t we be able to spend all that money and that’s not the way things work.
The way it works is that part of the spending cap is you have a limit of how much you can do on the spending cap. In
this particular year, it’s 2.8% and it’s a rolling three year average. So if you have a good year, or a bad year, or
whatever, it’s going to effect that. It’s very frustrating trying to work on a budget in that particular way especially in a
year where there has been a lot of grants that have been given. | can tell you that the City has a $1 million grant for
Locke Street and | sweat it all the time. Are we going to suddenly hit the spending cap and now we can’t use that
money? This has been promised since 2017, 2018 and that would be a horrible thing to do to these people. But just
putting that aside when our police and everybody works very hard to get grant money and the citizens say okay yeah
that’s a good thing because it’s not costing me anything out of pocket, it means that something else can’t be
purchased. Something else can’t get done because we got this free money. We tried very hard in the legislation to
put just that statement in that the override would be allowed in the one municipality. It got voted down because it was
not understood. | can see in looking at the horseshoe that it is a very confusing wording and so on. It is what it is.
The only way | know to change a Charter is to have a vote on it. The truth is if you go to the people and say let’s
change the spending cap, or let’s remove the spending cap, or let’s change it to a tax Cap, there’s going to be an
equal amount of people that are going to go out there and say no, no, no don’t do that because this is nefarious and
soon. So do we leave it? Do we change it? How do we educate people?
The bottom line is it’s there. | think that what Mr. Griffin has done is keeping it as simple as possible. As frustrating as
itis, | appreciate the work that you’re doing. The City does not have an override no matter what anybody tells us we
do not have an override. If you look at 56-D, the exception to the budget limitation is very, very limited and that’s what
we're stuck with and that’s what we're living with. Basically, pardon my language, but they gave the perforable finger
to our Supreme Court Justice when they put SB52 through and it was meant to hit Nashua and only Nashua because
it did not affect anybody and anybody who says or thinks differently is wrong.
Alderman O’Brien
Well stated.
Alderman Clemons
Thank you. | had a lot of thoughts but my question comes to the end of what Alderman Klee had just said and that is
has anyone challenged or is there going to be a challenge that you know of or to the Constitutionality of that Law?
Because if what you are telling me is that the State Supreme Court said one thing and the Legislature said another
that usually leads to the Court deciding who wins. So | don’t know if you think that...
Steve Bolton, Corporation Counsel
It’s not quite that simple Alderman Clemons. The Court interpreted what the Legislature had said. The Legislature
then amended the Statute so it said something slightly different with the clear intent to change the interpretation that
the Supreme Court gave. One - | know of no effort to challenge that; and two - | don’t think any challenge would be
successful. The Legislature had the perfect right to change its Statute.
Alderman Clemons
