Board of Aldermen Page 22
June 14, 2016
Alderman Siegel
| am going to go through a variety of comments that hopefully address some of the objections that were
made in public comment and deal with a little bit of the history with this and how we got here and correct
some very, very clear misconceptions about this legislation because | think certain people may have
literally read the wrong copy of the legislation, that’s all | can ascertain. There are communications on
your desk from Attorney Nicosia and myself. The attorney is stating that he asked for a continuance of
this legislation. This is not a court of law and you can see from my reply that | did not deny that nor did
President McCarthy as that is not how this Board operates. When legislation is referred to the full Board
it is strictly the power of the full Board, as a legislation body, to decide what to do. Should we, as a
legislation body, eventually vote to table this or do something else or kill it entirely, that is wnat we shall
do. It is not up to me or Alderman McCarthy, and in fact, that would be improper as we operate as a
legislation body so | don’t understand how that was even stated. | also want to say that the landlords
were very much included in this process and | will explain why that is exactly the case. This legislation
was originally referred to the Personnel/Administrative Affairs Committee so for those that were objecting
to how it ended up in the other committee it originally went there and was then sent back up to the full
Board of Aldermen and re-referred back to the Substandard Living Conditions Committee. The reason
was very specific, it was because a lot of the testimony associated with code enforcement and the
discussion about the tool kit for code enforcement, which by the way, had little or nothing to do with the
Country Barn discussion, occurred in that committee and it was felt that there would be a sufficient level
of expertise in that committee to have a meaningful discussion to forward the agenda of making the
legislation appropriate for all parties concerned. It was the will of the full Board of Aldermen to refer and
it was referred and committee meetings were held. There were two committee meetings held and when |
say the landlords were included in the committee meetings, let me be specific, Attorney Peter Nicosia
who represented the landlords was explicitly included in the discussions, he came into the horseshoe
and was a full participant in all of our discussions. That, by the way, as everyone on the Board knows, is
at the discretion of the committee chair and is not a requirement. We could have just said | am sorry but
you have sit there and make your public comment and then be done with it. As the committee chairman |
felt that was not forwarding anybody’s agenda. The idea was to get as much open discussion as
possible and as the legal representative and the elected spokesperson for the landlords that were in the
audience there was a general consensus that he was the right person to be at the meeting and he was
invited and was a full participant. | might say a very full participant as he had a lot to say. Some of it was
agreed to and some of it was not, that’s what we do in committee and that’s what we do at the full Board
of Aldermen, that’s how we deliberate. This idea that somehow the landlords were not involved in the
discussion to me is a misnomer unless they believe that their paid representative did not, in fact,
represent them. They were represented so that’s a misnomer, I’m sorry. | would also point out that the
landlords that were involved; to my understanding they were meetings at the Nashua Public Library in
which a lot of them discussed this legislation. Ve were not invited, | would have been happy to have
attended. City officials were not invited and I’m sure they would have been happy to attend. Nobody told
us about them and as for the notion of us not informing people about when these meetings would be
held, in fact, e-mails were explicitly sent by our legislative manager to Attorney Nicosia informing him
exactly when the committee was going to be meeting so that as much as possible, his constituents,
which are paying him, would be informed. To the extent that he did not communicate that to them, if that
was what occurred, that is out of our control but we went above and beyond and that was a professional
courtesy that | felt was reasonable. Now, there is a statement in Attorney Nicosia’s memorandum which
you received which states that the legislation was not amended and that this had gone through the
committee process and appeared back at the full Board of Aldermen tonight unchanged. We just voted
to amend the legislation with the golden rod copy in which it had been changed. One of the specific
changes that were made was to put the warning procedure back in to make it explicit, that it’s in there so
instead of there being nothing, which there is now, there is no codification of discretion now, it is exactly
what was asked for which was to address our fears that going forward there may be unreasonable code
enforcement agents in place and that there is nothing in the legislation that talks about discretion. Well,
it's in there. Please refer to the goldenrod copy to page 8 where that is explicitly put in there. My
