Board of Aldermen Page 3
January 10, 2017
Marchant, applied to the Rotary Club to become one of the people who are travelling there and there are three
others who are not city people who are going. She will, yes, be paid her salary during that period of time.
Alderman Moriarty
So while she is there will she be able to fulfill her normal duties at City Hall?
Mayor Donchess
Not as well as she does when she is here. She will be in contact with us and she’s developed some goals and
objectives that she can hopefully accomplish while she is there but obviously at a distance of 10,000 miles she
won't be doing the same level of supervision as she does when she is here.
Alderman Siegel
I’d like to echo the concerns of my colleague, Alderman Moriarty and | think he said enough. | voted against it
for a good reason and it appears it was even a better reason.
Thank you, Mayor, very much for the report on the Safe Stations Program. | would point out that the
hometown breakdown indicates that in fact Nashua residents are not the overwhelming participants in this.
There are 40 Nashua residents out of 75 listed here; 80 total. That's on the order of 55% or so. Admittedly it’s
a large percent but | was sort of surprised at how many participants are outside of Nashua, it doesn’t surprise
me that we have some because that would be natural but we’ve got 10 people coming from Manchester which
is substantial and they have their own program. We have people coming from Haverhill, MA and Woburn, MA.
Again, | appreciate that people want to find help in any way possible but help also costs some money so
hopefully we can get some help for that because we don’t want to see people just tossed out on the street but
on the other hand we are paying for this.
Mayor Donchess
As you pointed our 40 out of the 75 are from Nashua. We modeled this after Manchester and they don’t turn
anyone away. | believe their statistics for 2016 were that they had about 800 reports of which 339 were from
Manchester. Some Nashua people have gone up there and reported to their program. It’s impossible, | mean
somebody shows up and the say | am from Hollis or Dracut you don’t say sorry we don’t help you. | can check
this for sure but | think this might reflect their point of origin, in other words, a lot of the people who report in
here don’t have a stable living situation so they may have come from Dracut but been in Nashua for a week or
two weeks in a homeless or semi-homeless situation. | believe that the way they are reporting that is that if
they don’t have an apartment in Nashua even though they are here | think it’s reported as wherever they came
from. There might be more people that are associated with Nashua than the 40 but | can check that out. The
bottom line is that no one involved thinks we can turn people away...| Know that you are not suggesting we do
that but | am just explaining it.
Alderman Siegel
| want to make that clear, | am not suggesting that we turn people away.
Mayor Donchess
| get that you are not. In discussing it, it would be great if it could only be Nashua residents in a certain way
but when we open it up to anybody can show up we know people from other places are going to show up as
well.
Alderman O’Brien
Mr. Mayor, | have to compliment you on this program. This seems very successful. To help this successful
program more | don’t want to turn anyone away for lack of any medical coverage. Is it time to look at whether
