Organizational Mtg. - 1/7/18 Page 3
President McCarthy declared Dr. Storace, Dr. Cappetta and Dr. Wolf-Rosenblum duly elected
as members of the Board of Health for the ensuing two years.
Oath of Office administered by Corporation Counsel.
President McCarthy presented his Committee Assignments to the members of the Board of
Aldermen.
ALDERMAN WILSHIRE MOVED THAT THE COMMITTEE ASSIGNMENTS BY THE
PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF ALDERMEN BE ACCEPTED BY VOICE VOTE
MOTION CARRIED
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF ALDERMEN
President McCarthy
| want to first thank all of the members of the Board for their confidence in my leadership, and
returning me to the Presidency. In a few minutes, the real work will begin. | was asked, while
we were lining up in the hall, by Alderwoman Kelly if | remembered my first inauguration. | said
that | did, and | can tell you that my first official act as an Alderman was to move to close
nominations for the Board of Health. It occurred to me, since we had that discussion in the hall,
that while | remember the inauguration, | don’t know where it was, because on that day, this
would have been a sandpit full of snow. So I’m pretty sure we didn’t have it here; | would have
remembered that.
But it points out some of what Nashua has been through in the last few decades, with building
not one but two of the best high schools in New England; renovating most of our dozen
elementary schools and all three of our middle schools to various levels; building new fire
stations; building police stations; upgrading all of our infrastructure, to the point where we have
the city that we have today. We've made tremendous strides, but there is still a lot of work to
do. We are at the turning point of being a great little city, and that, | think, is where the work
needs to be concentrated. We're going to need to rely much more on our downtown over the
coming decades; to support Nashua and to be its center for growth. And | think we need to deal
with those issues. We're going to need to deal with the issues of how do we compensate our
employees fairly. You heard in Mayor Donchess’ remarks all of the fine work that’s done by our
public safety officials, our public works officials, and everybody else who works for the city. We
need to keep that going, and we need to make sure that stays there.
We need to do all of that, and we need to do it in the constraint where the State keeps pushing
expenses down to us. We now carry $15 million in pension costs that we didn’t have eight years
ago, and that is paying for other than year-to-year cost, which is about $6 million or $8 million.
We're paying three times what we ought to for pensions, and we have no way to collect that,
except out of our budget, which is constrained at this point by inflation to grow at a little over 1%
per year. This should be an easy challenge and I’m sure you're all up to it. | look forward to
working with you all.
REMARKS BY THE MEMBERS OF THE BOARD OF ALDERMEN - None
