Unidentified Speaker
Is there a better time of the day maybe to meet for State reps?
Representative MacKay
A couple things. One, | was remiss in stating that | represent Ward 3. | wanted to clear that up. | have a couple of
questions. What are the City of Nashua’s biggest issues that they would like we, as the State delegation, to
understand? How do we come together with the Aldermen and the delegation when there is an issue? There’s
legislation right now, | think it’s HB 92, and that has to do with the building codes and updating them to the 2015.
And | know Bill McKinney, Nashua’s building inspector, is very concerned about that, and as we all should be.
We need to update our codes. When is a good time to be able to have meetings so that we can bring together
the Aldermen and the State delegation to have a conversation, so when we go up there we can stand united and
say this is a city issue and we need to bring it forward as a city issue? | would like to be able to help in that
cause. So that’s just for me. As for day and time, maybe the holiday had an effect on this particular meeting.
Sometimes it’s easier in the morning. I’ve seen more people get together in the morning around breakfast time.
But again, | think as the weather gets nicer, it’s easier later, but | still think that earlier is sometimes better.
President McCarthy
I’ll address a couple of things you said. With regard to things like the bill on building codes, we’ve had a lot of
discussion about what the role of the Board of Aldermen should be in State legislation. And in fact, on most of
the things that deal with departments, we actually trust those opinions to our professionals. | would encourage
the delegation to meet with the building code officials. In fact, we have the same issue with the city clerk’s office
often. We have the same issue with the assessor's office, because there are lots of bills that come up every term
that are highly technical. For the most part, we would rather have the staff give you expert opinions than us give
you our opinions. It’s the policy bills that we’re concerned with. From that perspective, it’s mostly about the
money. If | go back and look at where we are now versus where we were 20-30 years ago, we were originally
promised $20 million in a grant to build the CTE program at the high schools; we never saw a nickel of it. We
were promised 30% reimbursement on the principle of the bonds to build the two high schools; we might have
seen 15% some years, often we saw nothing. The downshifted costs and the things where we made a decision
based on what the funding was going to be and it then dried up have shifted a tremendous burden on to the city.
The retirement system, as we talked about, there is probably $30 million plus today that wouldn’t have been
there had things stayed the same as they were when we made those decisions. We're pretty good at working
around that and not blowing the tax rate, while paying for that ever-growing burden. But those are the things, |
think, that affect us the most.
The other one, as was mentioned, is rail. It would be great to get help from the State, but under the current
circumstance of us having a Memorandum of Understanding with the Boston Service Rail Transit, | guess |
would ask that the State not get in the way of a solution we found on our own. And | am very concerned that
could happen.
Representative MacKay
| hope that does not happen. | concur. We absolutely need to have rail.
President McCarthy
We found a solution that may not be optimal but it is better than every other one in that it may come to fruition.
The guys that are looking at it are doing Worcester to Providence now, they’re looking at Bedford to Lowell for
us, and then they’re going to look at Lowell down to Worcester eventually, which will give us some very good
access to places we don’t currently have access to. I’m happy about that. My concern is that if the Rail Transit
Authority, as it is, gets in the middle of that and makes decisions that it thinks are for the greater good that mess
up that arrangement, I’d be very disappointed with that having been the final outcome of the work we’ve done.
