SPECIAL BOARD OF ALDERMEN
PUBLIC HEARING
JUNE 6, 2017
A Public Hearing was conducted by the Board of Aldermen on Tuesday, June 6, 2017, at 7:00 p.m. at
the Nashua High School North Auditorium, 8 Titan Way, Nashua, New Hampshire.
President Brian S. McCarthy presided: City Clerk Patricia D. Piecuch recorded.
The roll call was taken with 12 members of the Board of Aldermen present; Alderman McGuinness,
Alderman Moriarty and Alderman Clemons were recorded absent.
His Honor Mayor James W. Donchess was also in attendance.
PUBLIC HEARING
R-17-098
RELATIVE TO THE ADOPTION OF THE FISCAL YEAR 2018 PROPOSED
BUDGET FOR THE CITY OF NASHUA GENERAL, ENTERPRISE,
AND SPECIAL REVENUE FUNDS
Alderman Dowd
Good evening and welcome to the public hearing on the budget. Before | introduce the Mayor to give
a brief overview of the budget, | just want to go over the ground rules. I’m going to go through the
various departments in the budget. If you have a question on that particular department, please
come forward to the microphone and ask your question. If the Mayor or Mr. Griffin can’t answer the
question, they may ask assistance from one of their Division Directors. Please give everyone an
opportunity to ask their questions and limit any statements to a reasonable length and only ona
department that’s being currently discussed. With that, | will turn it over to the Mayor.
Mayor Donchess
Thank you Mr. Chair and thank you everybody for showing up tonight — Division Directors,
Department Heads, employees and of course most importantly our citizens. Mr. Chair | just have a
brief overview of the budget which CFO Griffin and | are going to provide.
The first slide talks about the presentation of the budget. So this year we asked that the departments
include more information to try to make the budget clear and provide more information to the
members of the public who do not deal with the budgets or the departments every day. This is part of
an effort that we’ve made to try to create more transparency and more citizen involvement. So you
can see that at the beginning of each department, each division, there are various mission
statements, description of services provided, some goals and objectives. We hope to build on this
and continue to make the budget a clearer explanation for people who have not gotten deeply into the
past.
The second slide speaks of the fiscal 2018 priorities as I’ve incorporated them into the budget. First
public safety which is our police and fire departments. We are in the midst of an opioid crisis that
people are well aware of. There was an article actually in the front page of the NY Times today
talking about how the number of deaths in the country is rising year after year and projecting that for
2016 there were probably about 59,000 deaths as a result of ODs. They expect 2017 to be higher.
We of course here in New Hampshire are part of this whole issue. We suffer this public health crisis
ourselves and as a result we, in my view and it’s expressed in the budget, need to maintain the level
of services with respect to our public safety agencies. The police department is doing a tremendous
job of arresting those who are involved in illegal drug trade having made over 800 drug arrests last
year in 2016 and they're ahead of that pace in 2017. Of course the fire department has been
