Board of Aldermen 11-27-2018 Page 7
Lynn Berry 21 Marina Drive. Good evening, | was very frustrated about this progress and a lot of the
things that really infuriated me that number one they didn’t even use a Nashua or New Hampshire
contractor, they got a contractor from Worcester, Mass. | got quotes from people, | live at Jensen’s
Park, and they have maintenance people there and they came and they opened up the bottom of the
mobile home so that it would be easily accessible. Then | had a plumber go in there and give me an
estimate and he said it would be between $150.00 and $200.00.
So then when the City sent over this representative of HUD, he told me he wouldn’t start the work until |
signed this lien on my house, which upset me very highly. So the gentleman came and he spent a
good two hours at my house and I’m retired and | know how long he stayed there. He wasn’t there for
more than two hours and he left. And he left it all open and | thought he was coming back, | thought he
wasn’t finished. | waited a day, two days, three days and finally he didn’t call back and | called the
gentleman at City Hall and | said, “Is he finished” and he said, “I think so” and | said, “Well | think you
better come look at this, it’s all opened up to the weather and it isn’t finished, he didn’t come back”. So
he said, “Well let me look into it’.
The next thing | know, the day after that, the gentleman came back and then he argued with me that he
wasn’t going to just close it up, he wasn’t going to put insulation. That really set me off, because | said,
“You can’t close it up in a mobile home and not put insulation”. And he said, “Well it's not in the work
order” and | said, “Well it should be”. So | finally got him to put the insulation in and close it up but that
was after he came back a second time and | said this is unbelievable, | can’t believe the City of Nashua
would have something like that for the elderly, | think it is a disgrace. Thank you.
Laurie Ortolano, 41 Berkeley Street. Good evening, | wanted to share a little more information with you
looking at some of the assessment data. We had the opportunity over the Holiday weekend to get
ahold of KRT’s data base in a form that we could actually look at and manipulate. It would be my
request to the Aldermen that in the future if we do and when we do another assessment that we could
look at the possibility of having that type of data that KRT provided in PDF form which was basic and
did not include a lot of the fields, be provided to the public to in Excel or a readable form so that we can,
as the public, work with that data to kind of see what went on in our neighborhoods and get what we
need to get. It would be so easy to put it out that way and it does not have the level of data that the
Nashua system would have in case we are concerned about manipulations or privacy; but it would
make it so much easier for us to look at our neighborhoods and to make comparisons to streets and
properties around Nashua.
In the process of really looking at the data we started wondering why we didn’t get a report from KRT,
we paid them what seemed to be almost half a million dollars to do an assessment for us. Next week |
will be going into City Hall under the RSA request that my attorney wrote to look into some of the
documents that the City is putting together and one of them was KRT correspondence. | don’t know if
there is a report from KRT that summarized what they saw when they did their assessment or what the
distribution was. We hear the Mayor tell us tonight that the average increase was 23% or 24%, we
came up with 26% in our data base, so you know, you always worry when you transfer data base that
you didn’t get it all as clean as you want or you know, it is a lot of work to bring one in. We had other
residents in Nashua that worked on it and put it together, so it wasn’t us doing it alone.
It certainly would be nice if the professionals through KRT would give us that data clean and we would
be able to know for certain if we are correct, but we are in the right ballpark. It just seems that we
missed a great opportunity hiring a company and paying as much as we did if we did not get a report to
look at what happened in our community when it came to assessing, where we hit these pitfalls and
take this data and have our assessing office use it to make improvements in the process by which they
are assessing. There clearly is room for improvements.
