Board of Aldermen Page 25
June 14, 2016
Alderman Moriarty
We did listen last time and | want to take credit publicly for at least doing that even though our lovely
local newspaper editorial attacked us. | am still on the fence on this, | could be persuaded either way but
| wanted to mention one thing in support and that is that everybody knows that | am sort of a liberty
minded person and I’m very small government and my instincts have always been from the beginning to
vote no because | think we ought to keep restrictions on the government. Once you offer the
government a power it’s very hard to take it away so | am very cautious when it comes to giving them
power. The best analogy | would use in this case would be the police department. The laws are written
to give them the ability to give someone a fine for speeding and I’ve had the police department do traffic
enforcement on Searles in Ward 9 and they will report back how many citations they gave and how many
warnings they gave. We live life already in Nashua benefitting from the intelligent thought of our elected
officials and our employees, specifically the police department who know when to give a warning. The
Mayor has already said that our code enforcement are good people and they are going to use good
judgement and | believe that if we were to pass this that all of the good landlords our of city are not going
to suddenly get piled under with fines and that the code enforcement is going to know just like the police
department does when to give a warning
Alderman Siegel
First to address my colleague, Alderman LeBrun’s concern, the amended version was attached to the
agenda provided at the meeting so that’s with you. If you looked at the legislation that is under O-16-003
on the website, that was not the legislation that is attached to the agenda. It’s very important to be
discussing the legislation we are voting on with the additions of the discretionary warnings. | want to
address this issue of the mandatory warnings which we had extensive discussions within committee and
in fact, after the first meeting in which this was brought up which generally everybody regarded as a very
cordial discussion, it was, we took all of the input and went back and said okay, what does this actually
mean in practice, is this going to work and if it’s fine we will put in there. There was no knee/jerk reaction
to say | don’t care what anybody says we are not going to put it in, in fact, the leaning went the other way
around. It was to say unless there is a reason to keep this out we will put it in so why was mandatory
warnings not put in? Let’s keep in mind this is not just a landlord/tenant ordinance, this is code
enforcement and Bill McKinney who is our building inspector gave the very specific example, a real life
example, of contractors that are effectively serial violators. They will come in on a job site and do
something completely out of code and completely illegal. If a mandatory warning were issued or required
then from job site to job site and they would go without any consequence whatsoever. With a
discretionary warning most contractors, as you can imagine, are completely legitimate so you give them
a warning they will say I’m sorry and the job there is no issue, that’s not a problem. But with that
mandatory warning it becomes something just literally that you can institutionalize (inaudible) and less
face it, somebody that is willfully violating is an unethical person. Nothing in the existing codes is
anything more than codified common sense and in fact, many times life/safety issues. The idea that we
would mandate a procedure which would specifically allow behavior which is negative is not okay and
that’s why it’s not in there. Now, to address this whole police state issue which may be overhanging that
was mentioned and | know it was not a specific topic but there is a need for government oversight. |
mean could you imagine a situation where we viewed our health department as a police state because
we came to a restaurant and the refrigerators were temped out at 65 degrees and food was in there and
we said do you know what, we will not empower code enforcement to do anything, we are going to have
a mandatory warning, which by the way, would refer to all code enforcements. So spoiled meat, no
problem just let it go. Again that’s an extreme example, it’s not something that is going to happen but
this idea that there is a police state and that we empowered us with new powers, we haven’t done
anything, the codes are the codes, it’s just here is an intermediate step other than going to court, again,
the police state would just be rototilling everybody and taking everybody to court. This does not do that.
