Board of Aldermen Page 11
June 28, 2016
were previously approved. That doesn’t mean that those approvals were good. The priorities going forward
have to change and in the meantime, | can’t support it.
Alderman Clemons
| think repealing the spending cap is a viable option that this Board could consider. The only thing | wonder is
if it's going to take Nashua to become like Fitchburg or Brockton before we do it or are we going to do it ahead
of that.
Alderman Caron
| too watched the Budget Review Committee work on this and | don’t support everything but | think the Mayor
and the Budget Review Committee worked really hard for this and | will be supporting this budget.
Alderman Moriarty
When talking about services it might be helpful to compare the services the city provides versus the services
the state provides through Concord. It works out given the $11 billion biannual budget in Concord versus the
$260 million budget in Nashua. Per capita the state budget is about the same size as Nashua which means
that the $6,000 per year that | will pay in property tax for Nashua, | get a certain amount of something from the
city and equivalently through all of the business profit taxes and various other things that | will spend that will
end up in Concord, they spend an equal amount. It’s useful to recognize that in the City of Nashua’s budget,
about 80% of our budget is for city staff so in some sense the services that you get is exactly the number of
people working for the city within 80%. If you take bond debt it’s almost entirely....lf you want to answer the
question quantitatively, are services getting better or worse you just count the number of people that are
working for the city. The police department has not gone down, the fire department has not gone down and
the school; the teacher to student ratio has remained constant over the past few years. The services in
Nashua have remained consistent. In Concord their salary and state budget is less than half. Basically
Concord just gives out welfare checks, Medicare, Medicaid; none of which | use. | was surprised that Mayor
Donchess managed to get it in under the spending cap at all. | am a big fan of the spending cap because
without it the tax rate would out of control. VWe’ve had many opportunities to show fiscal prudence without a
spending cap looming over our heads and had everything to do with the salary contracts that we passed which
| voted against 90% of them. In summary on the one hand part of me wants to support the budget because it
did come in under the spending cap but what | want to warn everybody about is this insidious spending cap by-
pass that we keep getting. | think we are up to five now. One example was that CTE special revenue fund and
we have a lot of bonding. There are items that should have been in the budget that, in order to keep the
budget under the spending cap they are being squeezed out. Another one is R-16-045, establishing an
expendable trust fund for the state employer pension cost which is coming here, that already failed once and
now it’s coming back. That is a spending cap end around end around. | can vote against the budget by the
mere fact that there are all these other spending cap by-passes that are occurring as a result of poor planning
up to it.
Alderman Siegel
The CTE fund was funded totally from money outside of the taxpayers of the City of Nashua. As far as the
legislation that will be before us for first reading, it's funded at zero. It’s a container so it doesn’t by-pass
anything. It’s just sitting there waiting to be filled which is unlike the previous legislation where one could argue
and there was an argument that was a by-pass and it failed. It’s to create the vessel such that should we find
money that was available we can set it aside for the time next year when we are going to be staring at a $2
million bullet aimed at our head.
Alderman Clemons
I'd like to point out that while the police department , the fire department and the class sizes in the schools
remain level, the problems that these individuals have to face every day is increasing. We have a drug
