Board of Aldermen 12-11-2018 Page 29
is to start. And | think we have started, and we need to continue and we need to invest in what we’ve
already started to keep going.
Alderman Caron
’ll be brief because we are talking about this resolution which was a $15 million-dollar bond and nothing
could be done until that $4 million dollars was raised. That was a real point for me and some other
Aldermen, Ben Clemons being one of them that we had something in place that the private sector was
going to be part of this. This change and maybe because we were trying to move this forward because
we wanted to make sure that we had that building, that we purchased that building, that we didn’t stop
to think that we would have to put some money aside for design work. | have no problem with that and
| agree with Alderman Tencza, this piece about the New Market Tax Credit is what does not sit well with
me, because it just makes me feel like we are using that instead of what we wanted to be set aside
which was $4 million dollars. And there is no guarantee on those Tax Credits.
So that’s why | am really sitting on this because | said | don’t want to vote yes on this because | am
really concerned, not that | don’t think we need that design work, we didn’t do our due diligence back
then but we are trying to rectify that and | don’t have a problem with that. | was here 30 years ago
Mayor and | know what it was when we struggled trying to keep that Arts Center open and doing the
things that we wanted to do. It was very discouraging | think for a lot of people that we didn’t get this
done. So that is my dilemma here; are we going to get what we asked for in order to move forward?
Because all the other groups that have come in, this has to be a public/private partnership.
And yes, we do have a lot of people in the room and they want us to vote yes for this and | know a lot of
them will step up to the plate because | know a lot of them. But! worry and | am still torn when it comes
to this vote whether | will vote yes or no. | want to see this succeed, but if you hadn’t put that Tax
Credit piece in there as part of the amendment, | wouldn’t have had any issues whatsoever because |
know that the purity of the resolution that we put together several years ago was standing. All we were
doing was to rectify the fact that we needed that design project in place to move forward even faster.
Thank you.
Alderman Klee
Thank you very much and | respect your comments about the New Market Tax Credit. | think a lot of
the conversation has been is it public is it private can we get can’t we get it. And | think it is semantics,
| hear people saying, you are just playing with words. | really try to do as much due diligence as | can
and | have not spoken and we have not had that presentation and | think that’s sad that we haven't
gotten that way. And | understand why it was delayed and why we had to deal with his schedule and so
on. So in my looking up and checking things and so on, | want to make it perfectly clear that this does
not hit the local tax payers, nor does it hit the State tax, it doesn’t come from that. It is a Federal
Program; the monies are released and | went to the Treasury Department and so on. The Treasury
Department is very clear and says for every $1 that is invested, there are $8 dollars that is returned
based on, let me make sure | have the right words, it generates $8 of private investment. That is very
key.
| started asking about well what is our possibility of getting this $4 million dollars and the more that |
started looking at it and | think we were all given some information on that and | looked and the State of
NH has gotten $200 million dollars since the inception of this. These numbers are based as of 2017 so
there has probably been a little bit more in the interim. When | look at it, and the main thing is for what
they called economic census areas, areas that are low income and when we look at the downtown and
the Tree Street area, this is going to be a boom for that particular thing. So | look at it and | say Nashua
is not a depressed area, but the census area of the downtown is. | look at these 9 cities, Errol,
Claremont, Concord, Derry, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Berlin, Newmarket, and Keene, those areas have
gotten it over and over again. Keene has gotten $10 million dollars; Newmarket, which we know is not a
depressed area - $17 million dollars; Berlin $33.4 million dollars. The Claremont, Concord and Berlin
are more than 50% of that $200 million dollars that has been received.
