Board of Aldermen — 02/13/18 Page 14
winning as a city, as a whole. | sat here and listened and spoke with Webb when he was here. | think he
answered all the questions | needed answered at the time. | am going to go forward with this and vote for it.
Alderman Caron
As a longtime resident of the City of Nashua, and | have said this before, | was not for this. The city has had
several opportunities to do this. This has been a long time coming. If we don’t do it now, when will we do it?
We will always have repairs to our parks, to our buildings, to our streets. We have to think about that as a
whole. One of the reasons | changed my minds was to listen to the presentations and also that we put the
stipulation in there that $4 million had to come from the private sector before we put nail to hammer to wood. |
think that’s very important. | have to agree with Alderman Klee that all these wonderful business people
downtown, they will all be opening up their pocketbooks and writing a check. | am sure it will take less than 24
months to get that $4 million in the bank for us to move forward. | think it is time, and | am looking forward to it.
For me to flip my vote from no to yes took a lot of talking and listening. | will be voting in favor. Thank you.
Alderman Schmidt
When our governor was elected, he told us that he was going to go to 100 businesses throughout the country
and ask them to come to New Hampshire. He has done this. He has traveled around the country trying to help
us build a stronger New Hampshire. The problem is only one company so far has decided to come here. They
decided to go to Portsmouth. | took a look at Portsmouth. Yes, they have the ocean. It’s a nice thing to have.
But Nashua has really, really, really great things in it. It has a terrific river. We've got an airport. We've got a
downtown that we can be very proud of. But we are missing something. | was wondering if maybe it had
something to do with the tax base. Portsmouth taxes on their properties is remarkably lower than Nashua’s.
One of the things that Portsmouth has is lots of small business. They have lots of small businesses because
they have young, educated workforce there. It is attractive to businesses. That’s what you can find when you
invest in things like an arts center. What happens is you drop the arts center into the center of the city, it
creates a splash. But it also creates waves. The waves that will follow it will be more small businesses, more
mid-size businesses, more people coming here. | think it is a prosperity ladder that we are building. | am so
excited to see this coming. | will vote for it. Thank you, Mr. President.
A viva voce roll call was taken which resulted as follows:
Yea: Ald. Wilshire, Ald. Gidge, Ald. Harriott-Gathright
Ald. Dowd, Ald. Klee, Ald. Laws, Ald. Lopez
Ald. Caron, Ald. Kelly, Ald. Melizzi-Golja, Ald. Tencza
Ald. Schmidt, Ald. O’Brien, Ald. McCarthy 14
Nay: Ald. Jette 1
MOTION CARRIED
Resolution R-18-001 declared duly adopted.
