Board of Aldermen 09-24-2019 Page 28
And that happened every presentation she has given. She has thanked the City but never the public
and that just shows a very strong dislike and I’m not the only one. She mentioned she took input from
other people, | don’t know if she incorporated theirs, but she’s not overly appreciative of any input.
On a second note, at the prior meeting on August 13", Ms. Kleiner got up and spoke about
investigations that have been going on. She mentioned, because | submitted a letter, that there was
concern on my part studying what happened in an audit report to $24 million dollars that was reduced
from 12 properties. She said during the 2018 update it was determined that the base rate for school
colleges, what we call Assessing Code 72 was incorrect. Correcting the table for Code 72 resulted in
the bulk of a $24 million dollar adjustment that you keep hearing about. This has been verified by KRT.
| am not certain how much you’ve all heard about the $24 million dollar adjustment. What happened,
and this was the launching of Right to Know requests. | requested an audit report and in that audit
report | discovered that one assessor, two days before the MS1 was going out, made a $24 million
dollar adjustment to 12 properties. It was unprecedented: it was strange. | was really concerned
because when | tried to look on the property cards to understand what happened there wasn’t full
documentation. | did find that a Code 72 change was done on a few of them. All of those properties
that were changed are not all tax paying properties, some were exempt, but some were tax paying
properties and they got massive reductions, massive.
When she said that this has been verified by KRT, | don’t, now first of all, when this happened and was
discovered in I’m trying to think when, May —| wrote a letter to her. | said, “Have you looked at that
audit report you sent me, are you concerned by these reductions, do you understand why they are
done, would it be helpful to meet, could you offer any explanation”. | heard nothing. After 2 weeks |
wrote back again. | got a letter from Legal saying this didn’t meet the requirements of a document and
therefore your concerns wouldn’t be addressed. At that point | went to the Attorney General’s office
and several other citizens did and said, “We want to understand what happened with $24 million
dollars”. And we camped out with our concerns at the AG’s office and they pushed it down to Nashua
and they came to us and said, “You’ve got to bring it to your Nashua PD”. So the Nashua PD opened
an investigation into this $24 million dollars. When you hear that there is no investigation going on,
there is no further investigation of the $24 million you keep hearing about, to my knowledge there is an
open investigation about this. And it frustrates me that it had to go to that extreme, that we had to
involve the Nashua Police and the AG’s office.
When | went and met with Mike Carignan, his comment to me was “Why didn’t they just answer your
questions, why didn’t they just answer you”. And | said, “Because they don’t, they don’t tell you why”. It
is even up at the DRA. You know, we as citizens should be able to question what happened to $24
million dollars and you know why did the reduction happen. This Code 72 change that she says was
verified by KRT what does that mean? You're a lawyer, you’re a lawyer, we’ve got some lawyers in
here? Did they verify that the change was correct? Did they verify, yes a change was made? Did they
verify yes it was done by that Assessor? It doesn’t mean they approved it. | don’t know what that
means.
So you know it is enormously disappointing because | hear a lot of concerns from this Chamber on the
money | am wasting in this City looking at things like this. But | would waste so much less had there
been some communication. Our PD wouldn't be involved with this; the AG wouldn’t have been
involved, the DRA wouldn't be looking at this. The Right To Know’s wouldn’t be happening.
President Wilshire
Ms. Ortolano, you have one minute left for our Public Comment Period, please.
