Board of Aldermen Page 10
January 24, 2017
Tomorrow at Harbor Homes is Project Homeless Connect. Any individuals who are homeless or having
trouble with housing, it’s an opportunity to meet all the organizations that could support you in Nashua. That’s
between 11 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. on High Street. Tomorrow is also the Annual Point in Time count where we try
to take a snapshot of everybody who doesn’t have secure housing.
Alderman Siegel
| have a problem with the possibility of our meetings becoming sort of a dumping ground for anybody who
wants to wander through from whatever location, wherever they are in the country, and using our public space
as a forum for these types of views, which we may hold, which is fine; we may not hold. But this is a
governmental body. We’re not here as a forum for somebody to espouse a viewpoint that’s not relevant to
Nashua. If those people are from Nashua, God bless. They can come in here, and we have certainly have
heard a lot of public testimony at the general comment period, which could best to described as somewhat
different. | respect people’s rights to free speech, but | would hope that they would respect our rights and feel
free to have that free speech where their local governments are located and not view this as the latest strategy
in whatever needs to be done or felt needs to be done to visit an opinion in a public forum. Others may not
share my point of view, but | find the possibilities incredibly troubling. Where does it end? That’s just my
Opinion.
Alderman Clemons
In regards to what the previous speaker just said, | could not disagree more. | think our public comment period
at the end of the Board of Aldermen meetings need to be as open and as liberal to whoever wants to come and
speak to us. Whether they be from Nashua or Florida or Ohio, if they have come to the meeting to speak to us
and they think they have something relevant to say to us then we should allow them to say it. | don’t agree
with anything that was said this evening in the public comment. | don’t agree. Those aren’t my views. I’m
prochoice. However, | will never, ever advocate for the nine people the right to speak regardless of where they
come from. It’s a value that | hold dear to my heart and one that is written well into our Constitution.
President McCarthy
As the Mayor said, we went up today on the retirement bills. It remains to be seen what effect the testimony
actually had on the committee. | did have a conversation with a couple of the reps afterwards which indicated
they had been listening and may look at some of the issues. A lot of interesting discussion was had. We also
went up last week and spoke to the aircraft fees legislation that Alderman LeBrun introduced. | think that one,
the point was made at least, we had other representatives from businesses at the airport and from business
from Pease Airport that echoed the sediments of we’re losing the battle to bring corporations to southern New
Hampshire and something needs to be done about it. | believe that bill will actually be sent back from the
Transportation Committee and referred to the Ways and Means Committee where | suspect some work will be
done to look at things like can the fuel tax have a slight increase to compensate the revenue we would lose
from the millage part of the registration fees. Tomorrow on our behalf, we didn’t have time to deal with the rail
resolution, and we’ve frankly sent quite a few of them north in the past anyway, Ms. Lovering will be taking a
letter from me that just references the resolutions that we have passed and copies of the resolutions to hand
out. I’m of the opinion that since there is no funding associated with the Rail Authority at this point that
repealing it is simply a mechanism to ensure that it is harder in the future to get rail to Nashua if we need it and
expressed my opposition to them doing that. This is an identical bill to one that we went an testified against a
few years ago. There was a request that try to get another meeting with the Legislative Delegation. The
evenings are quite crowded but Alderman Clemons has cancelled the Personnel on February 6, which is the
night of the Ward 7 meeting. We haven’t verified it with the Delegation yet, but | think what we are going to do
is schedule a meeting with the Delegation at Dr. Crisp at 5:00 p.m. which would then go to when the ward
meeting is at 7 o’clock so people can attend both of those things. We will keep you posted on whether that
words out or not.
