Board of Aldermen — 4/25/17 Page 2
If you look at first our police department, they made 749 drug arrests last year which is an incredible number
for a community of our size. This year, through yesterday, they had made 285 drug arrests which is slightly
ahead of last year’s pace. Since the beginning of 2016, they have arrested more than 1000 people on drug
charges. They are doing a fantastic job at making it very difficult to deal heroin and other illegal substances in
Nashua.
The Safe Stations program, and Chris Stawasz keeps all the statistics, has seemingly a significant effect on
the amount of number of ODs and drug incidents that we have. When the program started in November of last
year, we started to get about a person a day reporting to a Nashua fire station. In April of this year, this current
month, it is up to about 3 people a day reporting in. That's probably 75 people this month. At the same time,
the number of ODs have dropped significantly to the point where through Sunday night, the 23", there had
only been 6 OD incidents in Nashua. Through the night of the 23%, there were only 6 OD incidents in Nashua.
That’s compared to a peak of 47 incidents in October of 2016. Unless there’s kind of a spike in the next few
days, it could be the lowest month that’s ever been recorded since the statistics have been kept which goes
back to the beginning of 2015.
Of course essential to this effort is Harbor Homes, who is providing extremely good responsiveness and
service to those who report to Safe Stations. We are maybe alone in terms of this trend. In Manchester the
ODs have gone up significantly in the last couple of months. They are running a slightly different program, but
the point that | am making with respect to the budget is that despite the increases in costs that we do not
control, which | will address in a minute, this budget would maintain our ability to respond to the drug crisis
through current service levels for the fire department and for the firefighters who are doing such a good job;
Current service levels for the police department and the police officers that are doing such a good job; and,
current service levels and public kindergarten on the school department for everyone who is working very hard
there.
The two things | think this accomplishes is at a modest cost it expands to full day kindergarten and maintains
our community's efforts in the face of the opioid crisis.
The cost drivers, we have a few item costs that are going up significantly that are beyond our control. First of
all, we have the pension increase imposed by the State of New Hampshire that we discussed at some length
many times in the past. That is adding about two and a quarter million dollars to this year’s budget.
We have also the cost of health care. The city is self-insured, meaning we are not paying an insurance
company except to administer the program. Otherwise, the city pays the benefits. It’s not like a company that
buys insurance and you know exactly what your health care is going to cost. The health care is an estimate
based upon past experience as to the use that city employees will make the health care system. We
underestimated the amount of use for last year and the year before and costs are increasing. We need to
adequately budget for health care items so that we don’t go significantly into deficit. The amount of that budget
item in this budget has gone up $3.6 million to about $28 million.
Another big driver is the cost of water. Pennichuck’ s rates are going up 12 percent. There are some
additional costs related to the dams, but of course they are going to bring in more revenue and have an overall
downward or positive effect on the tax rate. Special Ed costs are going up far more than the cost of inflation.
That’s within the school budget.
Those are the main items that are affecting the budget. The bottom line is that the budget is up about 4
percent more than we would like, but it maintains current services in the fact of the challenges that |
mentioned, while at the same time paying these additional costs, the big budget items over which we have no
real control. Under the budget cap as recalculated following the wastewater decision, it’s about $1.9 million
below the budget cap as currently calculated.
A couple more items, hopefully briefly, we did change the presentation to some degree. If you look through the
budget you will see that each of the departments contains a written explanation of the mission statement, the
services and functions of each department. The point there is to give people who aren't as familiar with the
