PUBLIC HEARING
MAY 17, 2018
A Public Hearing was conducted by the Board of Aldermen on Thursday, May 17, 2018, at 7:00 p.m.
at the Nashua High School North Auditorium, 8 Titan Way, Nashua, New Hampshire.
President Brian S. McCarthy presided; City Clerk Patricia D. Piecuch recorded.
The prayer was offered by City Clerk Piecuch; Pledge of Allegiance was led by Alderman-at-Large
Lori Wilshire.
The roll call was taken with 14 members of the Board of Aldermen present; Alderman Caron was
recorded absent.
His Honor Mayor James W. Donchess was also in attendance.
PUBLIC HEARING
R-18-019
RELATIVE TO THE ADOPTION OF THE FISCAL YEAR 2019 PROPOSED
BUDGET FOR THE CITY OF NASHUA GENERAL, ENTERPRISE,
AND SPECIAL REVENUE FUNDS
Alderman Dowd, Chairman of the Budget Review Committee
Good evening and welcome to the public hearing on the budget. Before | introduce the Mayor to give
a brief overview of the budget, | just want to go over the ground rules for the public hearing. I’m
going to go through the various departments in the budget. If you have a question on that particular
department, please come forward to the microphone here in front and ask your question. If the
Mayor or Mr. Griffin can’t answer the question, they may ask assistance from one of their Division
Directors who are here. Please give everyone an opportunity to ask their questions and limit any
statements to a reasonable length and only on a department that’s being currently discussed. With
that, | will turn it over to the Mayor.
Mayor Donchess
Thank you very much Mr. Chair. | am glad to be here again on the public hearing on the FY Fiscal
Year 2019 budget. We just have a few slides to kind of give an overview and then, of course, we will
be available to answer questions.
So you see this is just a cover page and John will go to the next. We have discussed a little bit about
this before, Mr. Chair. There are a number of challenges that we are facing as we look forward to
Fiscal Year 2019. First of all, probably foremost we have a State mandated, State ordered property
revaluation which could and we talked about the details and there is just a little bit more about it in
here could because of the great increases our homes have seen, the increases in value over the last
5 years, the State mandated and ordered revaluation could result in a potential shift from property
taxes from commercial onto residential. If the commercial properties have not gone up as much as
residential, so that presents an over-riding challenge for us in terms of minimizing, mitigating, or
limiting the effect of the State ordered revaluation.
As the second bullet point says, we need to make some tough decisions when funding city needs.
There are many things requested by many different departments that we did not include in the
budget. There are positions in the school department, the fire department requested more
dispatchers, which | am sure would be very helpful. We certainly need more police officers and we
