Board of Aldermen Page 3
June 14, 2016
does is expand their code enforcement department and do more aggressive code inspection, that is one
way we could go or we could have proposed that approach. That would have taken in our case;
$400,000 out of the landlords of the city in order to expand our code capabilities and it would have hit
good landlords and bad. Another alternative is the one we adopted which is the approach used in Keene
which is, and they have had the citation system since 2002, and what we suggested is something much
less onerous than was passed in Manchester which is simply to say that to avoid this system where a
shrewd owner of a large very poorly kept facility can simply wait for us to cite them and then make the
corrections with no penalty whatsoever, we decided to propose something that would hit bad landlords,
not every landlord like the Manchester system, which would give the code enforcement people a little
more leverage which would enable them to issue a fine upon the discovery of a violation. In their
discretion, they can give a warning but they also can give a fine. Everybody who has testified agrees
that our code enforcement people are very reasonable except everybody is afraid | think without reason,
that they will suddenly become unreasonable or that we will hire new people who will suddenly take a
very aggressive approach and | just don’t think that’s realistic. We only have three code enforcement
people so really we don’t have enough. If we adopted the Manchester system we could certainly hire a
lot more or a third alternative is if we didn’t want to go with the way that has been proposed in the
ordinance or the way in Manchester, we could appropriate $300,000 or $400,000 extra dollars and hire
three or four more code enforcement inspectors and do even more frequent inspections at the bad
buildings. We could have someone go over there every few days just to make sure that nothing goes
wrong because they are not checking. In addition to just the conditions for the people in the building,
these facilities, particularly the one at 23 Temple Street, is a huge problem for Nashua, for the downtown,
for our image and for the success of downtown. If you talk with R.J. Finley who owns the building at 30
Temple Street, and they have done a very good job of bringing businesses and employees to the
downtown; they have taken that building from 10% occupancy up to 90% or 95%. The have Triangle
Credit Union, the have tech companies like Persistent Systems from India; they have Acumana and other
businesses that we want downtown. If you talk to them they say that they wanted to do a housing
development with a mixed use right over their garage but why didn’t they, at least according to them,
because of 23 Temple Street, because it is such a dump that they just didn’t want to take the risk of
investing $10 million next door. What they did is upgraded their parking garage and they did no
development. | think that is the kind of impact that we are seeing. At that same building we have 500
police calls per year so although | don’t fault or in any way criticize the good faith of the people that are
opposing this; | think they are not looking at the big picture. Are we really going to be able to do nothing
about any this, are we just going to continue to manage these properties and let out of town people just
take tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars out of them every year without doing nothing to try to
alter the way of doing business? | think we should pass this and if the code inspectors turn out to be so
onerous in their approach to it, we change it but | just don’t think that is going to happen and as the
Administrative Officer of the City, | will tell them do not; use good discretion and use good judgement.
One fear is that if you find that a tenant has kicked in someone’s wall in the hallway and it looks like the
tenant did it then obviously you should not issue a fine because the landlord is not responsible for that. |
think we can make this work and | think we can use it to at least some degree to strengthen our hand
against the very bad people we have who own some of the residences that we have really been focusing
on with this Substandard Living Conditions Committee. That's my pitch on the landlord/tenant Bill and |
know there are many people here who disagree with me but that is my feeling about it.
On another subject, there is one ordinance that you might not have heard too much about, it proposes
transferring management of the parking function from the traffic manager over to the Economic
Development Department. This was proposed by the Community Development Director Sarah Marchant
because the transportation manager is really a bus person and we need to align economic development
with the parking and the parking is really a downtown economic development function and it has to do
with the parking downtown and so we think it makes much more sense that person report to the
economic development director. Keep in mind that the transportation manager reports to the director
who reports to me anyway, they all report to me as the Mayor so they will be working together one way
or the other but it just stream line things a little more easily.
