Board of Aldermen Page 8
June 14, 2016
and have the support of the residents of the city. There is certainly a potential with the fines and the
increases that it could go over the statutory limits of RSA 31:393 which is a $1,000 limit for per offense
and that hasn’t been addressed in the ordinance. Once again, if there was an event based violation that
you could set up based on the seriousness of the event. That’s basically some of the points of the
memorandum itself. It could use a definition section on exterior standards versus building code
violations; it’s very ambiguous in a lot of instances. Ultimately, we understand that you are trying to cut
down on litigation and trying to cut down on the district court process but what you are doing essentially
is you are front loading the judge, jury and executioner so to speak with the inspectional people. At that
time the people are there to explain and to talk to people and probably get a break. If they are not around
at the time then they are not going to have an opportunity to explain anything. If there is appeals
process then now you have a back loaded process where people will always have an opportunity to
speak their minds and you are going to find a situation where people are going to be stuck paying fines
and they are going to demand to get to court even if it costs them more money, it’s just human nature,
they are going to want somebody to hear their story. Finally, there is a potential that this backfires and it
really causes rents to sky rocket. You may even see a new category in rents; first month, last month,
security deposit and all of a sudden there may be a new category, administrative fine deposit. You get
your money back at the end of the year if you don’t cause administrative fines at the property. | want to
thank you for listening to me and once again, | think that if you listen to the people in the city and get a
little bit more input then you are working in the right direction but it’s just not quite there yet. Once again |
request that you deny it, send it back to sub-committee or table it for another two weeks and just allow
more input to come in. Thank you very much.
Mr. Greg Lombard, 106 W. Parish Road
| own one building in this city and | don’t have much to add to what’s been already said other than to
point out that this type of an ordinance; | am just a small landlord and this is the kind of thing where you
say you are telling me to trust you code enforcement staff and that they will always be well intentioned
and | believe that they are. By the way, | support cleaning up the bad properties because that’s good for
all of us. It’s hard to look at something like this and not feel some anxiety when | know that | might be
facing some of the fines in here, particularly with the ten day notice; that’s not enough time to fix a lot of
problems, particularly the more expensive ones. These might put my kid’s college funds at risk, my
investments. Although | do trust the good intentions of everyone here, | think there really is a lot of
benefit talking with the landlord’s here because they are the ones that are going to know best.
Ms. Cecile Marquis, P.O. Box 3854
Mr. Whitney had written an article in the paper and he was going to be late so he asked if | could pass it
out to all of you. Also, | do understand, Mayor, that your concern with the hotels and the rooming house
and all that and | don’t take that away from you. | know that you do care about the city and the Aldermen
do too. The problem | have with this is that when you are looking at rooming houses and that is a
different; if this ordinance came through it’s supposed to be going against rooming houses is what we
were told. The next thing you know we find out that it’s about regular landlord’s; two-family landlord’s to
100-unit landlord’s and single-family homes too because if their siding is bad on a single-family home this
ordinance says that you have to fix it and if you are poor and you don’t have the money to fix it or you
can't paint it, some of these people don’t have anyone to do this work. | am concerned about that. The
other concern | have is as embarrassing as it was, it happened. We have to move forward and say this
isn’t good and work as a city including the landlord’s — which is the rooming houses. All | am saying is to
the Aldermen and to the Mayor is that this to me is only one sided and it’s not against the tenant. This is
against the whole thing of what is going on here and who is going to hurt the tenant. Some landlord’s
may say forget it, I’m not going to deal with this and sell their building to an out of town landlord and it’s
already happening. Everybody that | here is that the legislators are saying the best thing for Nashua is to
have owner occupied properties but owner occupied properties; especially if they are elderly or low
income, they are going to have issues with fixing things around the building and if you are giving them
