Board of Aldermen Page 9
June 28, 2016
cap and | like to see that, however, the priorities that we are establishing in the budget | am a little dissatisfied
with. | listened to a speaker who spoke in public comment today about social security increases and 2.5% may
not seem like a lot and sometimes we refer to that as a stable tax rate but it is stable growth in a tax rate where
many folks don’t have stable increases over the same period of time. Services have been maintained in this
budget and that’s great. The increase went all to salaries primarily; raises that were given largely that were in
excess of the cap and | think the city and taxpayer pay a price for that. If we were to take a look at the trends
you will see that salaries are up and pensions are up. Benefits are down and | think that’s a step in the right
direction. | think benefits probably still exceed those in the private sector. We see the operational portion of
the budget relatively flat and that’s the part of the budget where people say services have not been increased.
Here we have a budget, salary, and pension increase, services flat and taxes up and | think that I'd like to see
us in the future strive to change some of those trends so that salaries and pensions match more of what
happens in the private sector and that for increased money, if there is increased tax revenue to be raised it
goes to increased operational costs.
Alderman Clemons
| too will not be supporting the budget this evening but | have a very different reason. I’ve heard the opinions
that unions and salaries are to blame for the fact that we can’t do more in our city but actually my opinion is
that Nashua stands in the middle of the pack as far as wages go for most city employees when you compare
us to other municipalities. In addition to that there are many other reasons why services have stayed flat or in
some cases have been cut and those reasons are cost of materials and the cost of outside contracting, for
example, the school bus contract, the costs associated with downshifting of state liabilities onto the
municipalities. These things have all cut into what we can spend because of the spending cap. | consider
myself to be more liberal than the average person but even still; | am a homeowner in Nashua and | pay taxes.
| don’t want to see my taxes go too high but what | also don’t want to see is for me to pay more in taxes and
get less in service and that’s what this budget does. | know that the Mayor worked very hard to get the budget
under the spending cap but in order to do that some services had to be cut and whether or not you look at
those services as being important or not, the reality is that they are being cut and there are things that we had
last year that we won't have this year. Yet, we are going to pay more in taxes than we did before. In fact, for
the last 10 years we have been cutting the amount of services and increasing the taxes. For those reasons |
cannot support a budget that | am going to pay more for and have less to show for it.
Alderman Siegel
To address some of Mrs. Johnson’s points, there was a lot of discussion about what we could or could not cut
and in fact, | would recommend to anybody if they want to see a very constructive conversation to look at the
previous Budget Review Committee meeting where we did the wrap-up session on the budget and there were
a lot of suggestions made and potential ideas were kicked around about what could or couldn’t be done and |
think there was a wide variety of viewpoints and it was a very interesting exchange of ideas. Unfortunately, we
were not able to come up with anything. From my perspective it is somewhat frustrating. In the past | have
been able to come up with certain things. Just FYI, one of the things we might look at in the future is the
stop/loss policy that we have. | have gotten some figures from Mr. Griffin on it. It’s a large insurance policy
that we are paying right now but there’s no reason to do anything with it right now because we've paid already
for the premium going forward and effectively we’ve got a free look for quite some time until we have to
actually take action on the renewal of that policy so there’s no particular reason to do anything and take it out
of the budget when the possibility may exist that we will actually use it above and beyond what it costs us.
That was specifically why | didn’t address that. As far as the notion of specific services which are cut, | would
challenge anyone to identify the significant amount of cuts of services because | know where the money came
out of. There was a significant amount of money saved in the bond debt, there was money saved in the
healthcare provisions and some different estimations on other costs. | think if anything we did a fairly decent
job balancing the need for accommodating the expenses of the city and finding some savings where they are.
It’s very difficult because we have certain costs which are not contractible. We can’t tell bond holders that we
are going to cut your payouts by 2%. Once you go through those things which are fundamentally inflexible you
are back to trying to make the hard decisions about what to do. With regard to the police contract, | voted in
favor of it reluctantly because the way the police supervisor’s contract was structured we really would have had
