Special Board of Aldermen Public Hearing Page 3
Next slide — We want to start Imagine Nashua 2040 which is the first citywide master plan that has
been done in 20 years. The budget funds the first half of that; this would be a two-year project so
we'd need to include money next year as well. The Planning & Economic Development Committee
will obviously and the Planning Board will of course be very involved. We may seek to get citizens
involved as well but the idea is to visualize what our community, to imagine what our community can
be in the next 20 years and incorporate those ideas into the city master plan, which as being 20
years old is out of date.
Another issue that we address here though an increase in revenue, a contribution from our
ambulance provider is to increase the fire dispatchers. Right now there are only two fire
dispatchers on duty at any one time. That number has been constant for decades. The number of
calls that the Fire Department receives on an annual basis has increased from several thousand
way back when this number of dispatchers was first established to over 11,000 calls in the course
of a year. And it may go higher than that, so obviously they are very busy and we rely very greatly
on fire dispatch. They respond to many, many calls not only fires but all medical emergencies,
opioid overdoses and everything else that goes on in the City. So this will take some pressure off
and help us to deliver quality response, emergency response with respect to these 11,000 or
12,000 or more calls a year.
Here is an overview of some of the things in the budget. The budget as proposed is a total of, the
operating budget, of $270,300,000.00. That’s a $4.2 million dollar increase in the budget without
the health care issue, which | will discuss in a minute. The rest of the budget is only up 1.6% but
we have a $3.3 million dollar increase in healthcare costs. As you know, we are self-insured here
which saves the City a lot of money, much cheaper than actually buying insurance, but health care
costs are going up and we are seeing an 11% increase this year which will increase that area of the
budget by $3 million dollars. That is the reason we are trying to be as tight as possible with respect
to everything else, to meet that cost as well as maintain, and in some cases, improve the quality of
services. So we are seeing $7.5 million dollar increase in the budget, which is 2.86%. And the $4.2
million dollar increase | mentioned is the increase but for healthcare, on the base of about $260
some million dollars.
In terms of revenue we are continuing to budget revenue conservatively, David Fredette who is the
City Treasurer of course is responsible for automobile registrations and some other revenues is
very instrumental in helping us project revenues along with the CFO John Griffin. We believe that
the revenue from our vehicle registrations will be stable or maybe up slightly from last year, but it is
a pretty healthy source of revenue. We are in a continuing low interest rate environment, that
means that the income coming in from the City’s investments is quite low. There was a time when
interest rates were higher and that revenue item was actually quite significant because if we have
tens of millions of dollars in the bank and we are getting actual interest on that, that can result in
quite a bit of revenue. But in the current environment, it is very limited.
We also face at least the potential reduction in State Aid Funds, specifically the Stabilization Grant
in the field of education. Now we are hopeful that in the legislature we will see a change in that
trend. The House Budget that passed would make a considerable improvement, help the City very
much and we have a number of members of our Board of Aldermen who serve in that legislative
delegation. So we really appreciate their help there. We do need to try to get the House Budget
now through the Senate, but if it does pass in the form, and it is not vetoed, it gets very involved:
but if it were to pass in the form passed by the House we would definitely see increases in revenue,
particularly in education which we very much need.
