Special Bd. of Aldermen — 11/26/2018 Page 5
Ms. Johnson Yeah | know you have a very good memory. That’s one of the reasons why we wrote that
resolution. | don’t think that somebody who didn’t put their name on the ballot, knock, knock, Facebook,
Twitter or anything else should waltz right in that nobody knows anything about it, that the voters in the City
should be able to really take a seat. You should be able to if you want the seat go out and do what you have to
do for an election. Let the voters see what you represent and who you are to be out there. Because my other
concern is that you are picking you call up and you say “hey we got an open position why don’t you put your
name in, I'll put in a good word for you”. It’s like a job, it’s not a job here, this is talking about the tax payers,
the money and what it costs in the City. And if you want this, go out and knock on the doors and do what you
have to do to become an elected official. And | don’t watch this very often anymore because | just get sick and
tired of seeing how my money is being spent. But! want to say something to you Corporation Counsel Bolton,
| don’t care if you like what Mr. Teeboom says or not, there’s no room for rudeness and you get paid with our
salary and don’t even answer me back because | am not going to tolerate this and you were wrong and you
owe him an apology. We are the ... don’t even say anything, we are the tax payers of the City and we have
the right to ask these questions and don’t be rude on an answer back, thank you.
President Wilshire
Anyone else wanting to give testimony in opposition?
John Lisle My name is John Lisle, 68 Blue Stone Drive, Nashua. | am the moderator of Ward 8 and have been
for the last 6 years. | am speaking in opposition to this proposal for two reasons. One, | believe that it is
effectively cronyism on steroids, because you have an elected Board picking the person who is going to
replace for a vacancy. But we’ve had three special elections in the last four years now all of which have had
minimal turnout, they've been expensive to hold, they are extremely wasteful of the resources that we have in
our City, so | believe neither the existing proposal that you have in front of you nor the existing plan or process
that we have are effective. | feel sort of the grandfather of this particular proposal because after the special
election to replace a Board of Education person last year | wrote a letter to the editor of the Telegraph and got
a lot of positive response to my proposal, | also had negative response from Mr. Teeboom because the
proposal that | came with reflected, he felt a degree of cronyism. | believe the proposal that | put forward for the
replacement of a vacancy minimizes the cronyism and saves the City significant money and gets a new person
in place in a timely fashion. Now | have delivered to the Board a detailed testimony on this that | am willing to
take questions on.
President Wilshire
Seeing none, thank you. Anyone else wishing to give testimony in opposition to Resolution 18-073.
Timothy Sennett Hi my name is Timothy Sennett, I’m a resident of Nashua, 62 Underhill Street. | hope you
will forgive me for not stepping forward, this is actually my first public hearing and | wasn’t quite sure where my
comments were appropriate. | am favor of re-evaluating the method in which we fill vacancies on the elected
Boards. | don’t feel that is necessarily needs to be a matter of either / or. Either we hold a special election or
the Board appoints somebody. The indecisive side of me says that there is a method that fulfills both. | think
back to the election that we just held last week to fill the unfinished term of Alderman McCarthy. By the time
we were able to hold that election this past week, Alderman Clemons is already likely thinking about re-election
should he choose to serve further. He’s already gone through the process to get his name on the ballot and he
is going to do so again presumably this summer. For such a short period of time, | feel like that might be a
situation where the Board may be able to step in and appoint somebody to fill that role. For something last
year, where Robert Howell stepped down from the Board of Education, he gave us plenty of notice, he had two
years of an unfinished four year term. In that case | feel an election was appropriate, two years is a long time
to appoint somebody to fill a role, | feel that is an appropriate situation where the people have their say,
whether or not they choose to come out. | hope that this is maybe something that could be considered, that
maybe rather than going forward with just an either / or black or white proposal, something could be done to
take in both sides of consideration. Thank you.
