Representative MacKay
| think | would be too.
Alderwoman Melizzi-Golja
Representative MacKay, | totally appreciate the difficulty with evening meetings, but | will say some of us have
day jobs, and night meetings are what we do. You’re right, | get it. It’s really difficult to try and get people to
come together. We probably would have had a better representation. Again, | think a lot of tonight’s issue is the
holiday. | concur. Sometimes it’s really easier to have people at night. It’s just hard to choose.
Senator Lasky
| have a question: Do we have a liaison anymore with the legislature from the city? | don’t believe so.
President McCarthy
| don’t know. Ms. Kleiner can probably address who is there from the Mayor's office. We have actually got our
legislative assistant, one of her duties now is to take care of that for the Board. We actually send her up to testify
at hearings.
Senator Lasky
And it is more of the communication between the city and the legislation that’s coming forward. The other thing, |
know in the past we used to have a meeting with the department heads and the delegation, where they would
get into specific bills. | think that’s always very helpful. | think where we have newer Aldermen and we're in the
middle of a legislative session, we don’t have anyone in the Legislature is brand new. But | believe there are a lot
of people who have not been to various departments, not seen a lot of the agencies and a lot of the people that
we work with, and that is really important.
The last thing | want to say is that we are sent to Concord by the people of Nashua, and in some cases the other
center is the surrounding area. Too often, | have seen our representatives put their leadership first, their party
first, and many other things before the citizens of this city and the people who have sent them to represent them.
That is the hardest thing. If we stuck together — when it arises, yes, there will always be a few, but when we know
that our city and the people in our city are going to benefit from certain things and we say no because someone
else is breathing down our necks for a parking place or a chairmanship or some other ridiculous thing, than none
of us deserve to be representing the citizens of this city.
Representative Mangipudi
Just to acknowledge that this session particularly, as a rep, | did get a lot of information and support from the City
Hall and the Mayor's office. Several times | would be on the floor and this is going this way, the bill is in and this
is how it’s going to affect Nashua; dollars, as well as in terms of policy. It was very, very helpful, even though we
don't have a particular liaison, to get that information and share it with the Nashua delegation there, at least the
people that are sitting around. So they were very helpful, and | think these meetings, at the end of the day we
are still social beings. As much as we can live off of Facebook and social media, at the end of the day, meeting
in flesh and blood makes all the difference, because you put the humanness into this. So thank you for keeping
this consistent and it means a lot to me to represent the voices of my constituents and also as a city where my
home is.
Ms. Kleiner, Chief of Staff
We did have a liaison, Derek Danielson, from the city. Derek has left the city unfortunately. What we have been
working with, with our IT department, is an automated process where the city can download all of the bills, where
they are, and send those out to our division directors to get information back from them; like Alderman McCarthy
was saying, to get that expert advice on bills. Last year, we sent emails to the delegation. We got a lot of
feedback on that, yet it was too tedious of a spreadsheet. | think at that time it had over 100 bills on it that we
