A regular meeting of the Board of Aldermen was held Wednesday, December 26, 2018, at 7:30 p.m. in the
Aldermanic Chamber.
President Lori Wilshire presided; City Clerk Patricia D. Piecuch recorded.
Prayer was offered by City Clerk Patricia D. Piecuch; Alderman Tom Lopez led in the Pledge to the Flag.
President Wilshire
Before | ask the Clerk to take the roll, Alderwoman Kelly is participating by telephone, and under the terms
of the State law that allows her to do that, she needs to explain why she can’t attend, if she can hear us,
and who she is with, if anyone.
Alderwoman Kelly stated the reason she could not attend, confirmed that she could hear the proceedings,
and stated who was present with her.
President Wilshire
Acknowledged that those present could hear Alderwoman Kelly as well.
The roll call was taken with 11 members of the Board of Aldermen present; Alderman Gidge, Alderman
Harriott-Gathright and Alderman Klee were recorded absent. Alderwoman-at-Large Kelly was not in
attendance but participated via teleconference.
Mayor James W. Donchess and Corporation Counsel Steven A. Bolton were also in attendance.
REMARKS BY THE MAYOR
Mayor Donchess
Well first of all it is the Holiday Season, Happy New Year to everyone, | did wear my red tie in the hopes of
getting even close to Alderman O’Brien the tie he wore last time but he now held out, so | guess | am now in
the front of the parade.
But to get down to more serious matters; before you is my veto of R-18-066. | am going to bring some new
information to your attention, tell you that this is actually a serious matter which can have implications across
City Government and | am going to ask you to consider either sustaining the veto or at least tabling it so you
can consider and think about what | am about to bring to your attention.
What this is part of is an effort that goes back almost 20 years across all the civilian parts of Nashua’s work
force to reduce very significant costs in terms of sick leave buy outs that occur at the time of retirement. This
effort has been applied with respect to City Hall employees, teachers, civilians in the Fire Department and in
the Police Force. It has never been applied to the uniformed officers, often they are treated differently, they
have a different pension system, they have a different set of risks in their jobs and different really employment
criteria. But what this Ordinance addresses, and | will get into the broader picture in a moment is that 17, going
on 18 years ago now, in order to reduce payout costs for sick time, the City instituted a new policy which said
that instead of being paid 100% on 720 hours, or 90 days of unused sick time upon departure from City
employment, that would be changed to 20% of your entire accrual.
If you accrued 1,000 hours, it would now become 200 hours not 720. That was done to reduce costs. The
same thing has happened in the teaching force. Although City Government moves slowly and some of this
takes years to accomplish, but around the time of 2010, 2011. 2012, there was great public outcry about the
pay outs which were occurring and being paid to members of our teaching force, our teachers, upon retirement
for unused sick time. At that time, what the teachers’ contract said was that you could be paid for 100 days.
Now a teacher is paid on 184 day teaching year so 100 days was approximately 55% of a teacher’s annual
salary. So for a teacher making $60,000.00 this 180 days, and we are just talking ballpark figures, would have
been about $33,000.00.
