Board of Aldermen Page 11
April 26, 2016
time when we need to use the mechanisms that we have in place because things are at a point where we have
no control over them. This being the pension costs coming down to us from the State of New Hampshire. |
look back as a taxpayer who has owned property in Nashua since 2007; multiple properties, and | think to
myself that | have paid in to this pension cost, my tax paying has gone into this and the reason we have set it
aside is because we knew that some of these costs were going to be a burden to us later on down the road. |
also look at it from a taxpayer perspective as we have the spending cap and in years past we have not gone
over it but have been under it. When | combine the fact that we’ve had millions of dollars of savings over the
course of the last twenty years because this Board has done the prudent thing and kept the budget under the
spending cap, | look at this situation and | say to myself why wouldn’t we, at this point, spend the money that
we've put aside so that I, as a taxpayer, don’t have to worry about the fact that $350,000 extra is going to go
just to pensions instead of maybe going to the schools or the fire department or the police department or any
number of city services that we pay hard earned money for. | look at this situation as it’s been a long time
coming and we are now at the point where we need to say this is the year that the spending cap has to be
overridden because we have costs from the state that are mandated to us that we have no control over and we
have to pay. We can either pay the money from the taxpayer's money that we put aside or we can spend the
money from the taxpayers that we are going to collect from them next year and leave the money that we
already have aside. | think we ought to spend the money that we already have instead of taxing people in the
future for these costs.
Alderman Moriarty
We could debate whether this principle and interest exclusion is equivalent to a spending cap override. By
virtue of the fact that it requires ten votes, implies that it essentially has the same mathematical equivalent as a
spending cap override. To blame the financial challenges that we have on the existence of the spending cap is
somewhat like blaming the speed limit for being tardy to an appointment that we knew about well in advance.
Four years ago when | joined the Board of Aldermen | could foresee these challenges ahead of us and I’ve
been voting accordingly and tonight | am going to continue to vote the same way and vote no on this item.
Alderman Siegel
Nobody is blaming the spending cap on anything. None of the discussion blamed the spending cap. In fact,
my reference was a flaw in the way the spending cap Charter legislation works in that it doesn’t allow me to
ratchet back the number. The flaw is wooh’s me there’s a spending cap, the flaw is gee, it would be nice if
there was a tool that was even friendly to the taxpayer to allow me to do this and still ratchet it back. | think
that characterization is just false. | have an idea, my plan B, to hopefully address some of the concerns. It
seems to me that the biggest concern is the bump in the cap and the possibility of that being filled up by
promises made that have nothing to do with my purpose in this legislation. It’s so frustrating for me. | feel like
the intent of this has been diluted by this idea that somehow oh, we made all these promises and this is the
only way we can do this, like that was the intention. When | was thinking about this | didn’t hear about any
promises or anything. This is strictly intended to deal with the downshift in the pension cost. The plan B | have
is to take the effective problem which is to say we are taking that one lump money and we are putting it all at
once into the trust fund and that has the unfortunate side effect of bumping everything up by that amount. The
trust fund is set up right now to be available in thirds over three years so the plan B, and I’ve actually hand
changed the legislation but it wouldn’t be appropriate to have all of those legislation changes at the full Board,
is to say okay, how about we take the one third and set that aside as the kicker because it doesn’t have the
type of dramatic bump in the cap number and it hopefully reinforces the notion that this is not intended to be
everybody’s saving grace to get some magical contract approval, that’s not the point. This is a change that we
could actually fairly easily make. Again, | wouldn’t do it at the Board level, we would have to send it back to
budget where it could be properly vetted and I’d certainly like to pass it by CFO Griffin to see if | haven’t missed
anything while | was editing it today. | went over the legislation point by point to see if this was feasible and it
appeared to be. | am hoping that for those who have objected to the raise in the ceiling that this is something
that maybe would say okay, I’d be willing to consider that because it’s hopefully more clearly for a purpose.
These are not contracts you can slip in under that cap number and we could work with it that way. I’m not sure
that we have enough people comfortable with the arguments that were made to pass this and I’m concerned
