Board of Aldermen Page 13
September 14, 2016
Nashua is not the only one that has this issue and they don’t like it any more than we do. It’s a $2 million
bill that we have to pick up in our budget that is not something that we have any way to avoid and to take
that $2 million out of the budget and start impacting schools, fire, police, DPW and paving, | don’t think
the citizens of Nashua want that to happen.
Alderman Schoneman
| don’t think the citizens want us to just spend more money. If this is for next year, for something that
requires budgeting for fiscal 17 then we should have that conversation anyway.
Alderman Lopez
| think the assumption that we are spending more is based on the expectation of a particular Aldermen’s
mind that we should cut services. To the point that was made earlier that there probably are not a lot of
people who are incredibly eager to pay more taxes but I’ve never heard anyone say | don’t want my
garbage picked up or my kids to go to a good school. I’m not excited about the police department or the
fire department not being able to respond effectively. | think for the most part the people who voted for
me understand that the taxes that they are putting into the City of Nashua are providing services and
they probably don’t anticipate us deciding to cut those next year because we don’t want to handle a
problem that was dropped on us this year. We know that the problem is here. We didn’t create the
problem but we should do something to fix it, | think that’s what all of our jobs are.
Alderman O’Brien
| hear a lot from one particular Alderman and | really do question the facts because | don’t see where this
costs more. The process is what is important here. In my home if | need to put a new roof on to avoid a
leak we squirrel money away in the budget in anticipation of eventually getting the roof done. We are
going to be faced with the pension problem next year. To me this is prudent. The taxpayers of this city
has done this for years, they all have roofs. They understand and trust us as Aldermen to try to come up
with the best way to manage the budget in this city in anticipation of our liabilities. Wwe are an employer
and our employees have a pension program. Unfortunately things happen up in Concord and it’s nothing
that this Board can control.
Alderman Clemons
The conversations that | have had with taxpayers regarding issues like this, the spending cap in
particular but particularly this legislation...when you pose the question like this, I’ve already collected
$900,000 for the City of Nashua, would you rather me cut your services next year by $900,000 or would
you rather me take the $900,000 that is already in my pocket and apply that to a liability that we know is
coming down from the state? We could just pay the bill or your trash pick-up could be cut back to once
every two weeks and maybe lose a few firemen and policemen. When | present it like that most people
look at me and say why is this even a discussion and | say exactly. | guess | just respectfully disagree.
We have no control over this but we do want to fund things that we do have control over which is our
police department, our firemen, education and our roads. We have the money to do both and this is the
mechanism by which we can do both. The fact that some of us don’t understand that is something that |
won't ever understand.
Alderman Deane
The one thing that hasn’t been mentioned about this is that this is a reoccurring cost. We met with the
state about the pensions and maybe somebody can help me with this but they set up a scenario where
they wanted to get that pension plan funded at 100%. That’s absolutely ridiculous. It doesn’t have to be
at that percentage. The public works plan | believe is at 83% which is unbelievable. It was more than a
bad economy that caused the states pension plan to tank. I’ve set up a number of expendable trust
