Board of Aldermen — 9/26/17 Page 5
If we use the same approach that we have been approach that we have been using for the last 25 years, or 24
or 23 years, we use the $258 million as the base. The ordinance says that ten percent of that number of the
fund appropriation needs to be in the reserve. If we use that figure against the now increased unassigned fund
balance of $29,921,501, using the same approach we have for the last more than 20 years, we come up with a
11.6 percent unassigned fund balance as compared with the municipal budget.
These are the actual figures down to the dollar. We've increased the reserve by $400,000. We have not
drawn down $7 million. That is completely wrong. We are, in fact, doing the reverse and increasing the fund
balance by $400,000.
If you want to see the numbers, they are right here. We gave the numbers to the budget committee. This is
prepared by the CFO. Anyone who wants to see it right now, they can. All the details are right here, and | just
read most of it to you. So, | think there’s a misunderstanding about how the system works. Mr. Teeboom,
although | think he put his good faith effort into this, missed the fact that we have a $9.6 million surplus and
that gets added to all of the money that is in the city. | think that’s where the error occurred.
Thank you, Mr. President.
Lt. Brian Kenney, Nashua Police Dept.
I’m a detective lieutenant at the police department in the narcotics division. On behalf of the police
department, | was asked to come here tonight to touch base and to relay a little bit of our feelings on one of the
topics you are all going to discuss tonight as my understanding goes, and that’s the state funding under the
Granite Hammer Grant that we are scheduled to receive this year. As most of you know, we received the grant
last year under the Granite Hammer program where we were able to specifically target the opioid crisis to
include heroin, fentanyl, oxycodone, all the opiates that are affecting our community.
We believe we were very successful last year. We ran Granite Hammer operations from November of 2016,
up until the beginning of June of 2017. Throughout that time, we had more than 208 arrests directly related to
those specific patrols, not including our normal duties. Eight-four percent of those were felonious arrests,
meaning possession of felonious substances, specifically opioids and sales of those substances. Those were
all related to the county attorney’s office.
One thing we learned that | think is of the utmost importance, once we got a few months in, is there was a
difference being mean and there was a feeling on the street this was happening. We didn’t necessarily
anticipate that, but through talking to people, through talking to arrestees, just people who would call us to give
tips or information, things like that, people who typically assisted us in investigations are still willing to do so but
the story had changed. It was | have this information or | would like to help or even the defendant would say |
would like consideration for my charges, but we’ve got to go to Lawrence. | don’t even know where to get it in
Nashua anymore. We were hearing that time and time and time again, which from my standpoint was positive.
We viewed that as a success to some extent because we were taking it back to the source city.
Nashua, as most of you know, is not necessarily what we would call a source city. Are we affected by the
opioid crisis? Of course we are; we are affected greatly by it. But we were now starting to take things away
from the city. We were being told that larger scale dealers weren’t showing up anymore. They were dictating
the terms of these sales, and they were dictating to New Hampshire residents, you have to come down to
Lawrence. We won't deal with you in Nashua. You bring up the word “Nashua” on the phone, and the phone
gets hung up.
These are some of the things we're dealing with. Once we started to see some of that, we started looking at
overdose numbers which is kind of the whole reason what this grant is supposed to target. We want our
overdose numbers to come down. From November 16 to June 17, we had 151 suspected opioid overdoses.
We looked up during that same timeframe the previous year when we were bare bones, 40 hours a week
enforcement as usual, and we were over 200, which is a decrease in 25 percent for just the period where we
ran Granite Hammer operations.
