A special meeting of the Board of Aldermen was held Thursday, March 7, 2019, at 7:00 p.m. in the
Aldermanic Chamber.
President Lori Wilshire presided; City Clerk Patricia Piecuch recorded.
Prayer was offered by City Clerk Patricia Piecuch; Alderman-at-Large Michael B. O’Brien, Sr. led in the Pledge
to the Flag.
The roll call was taken with 11 members of the Board of Aldermen present; Alderman Gidge, Alderman Schmait
and Alderman Lopez were recorded absent. Alderman Harriott-Gathright arrived after roll call (7:10 p.m.)
His Honor, Mayor James W. Donchess, and Corporation Counsel Steven A. Bolton were also in attendance. We
also have with us this evening CFO John Griffin and Chief of Staff Kim Kleiner.
President Wilshire
Alderman Lopez did inform me that he was unable to be here this evening.
COMMUNICATIONS
From: Lori Wilshire, President, Board of Aldermen
Re: Special Board of Aldermen Meeting
There being no objection, President Wilshire accepted the communication and placed it on file.
MANAGEMENT AUDIT REPORT FOR THE ASSESSING DEPARTMENT DATED MARCH 1, 2019
President Wilshire
At this point | will turn it over to you Mayor.
Mayor Donchess
Thank you very much Madam President. We are here tonight, and as you said | am here with CFO Griffin and
Ms. Kleiner to present the audit of the Assessing Department which was initiated earlier this year and was
completed recently. | think you all got copies of the written audit maybe last Friday via e-mail and | assume
you've at least had a chance to look at it. | think what the audit sets forth is a number of steps that we can take,
hopefully in the immediate future, to streamline and improve our assessing function. If some of these steps, you
as the Board of Aldermen need to approve, we hope that you will do that with dispatch, so that we can begin as
quickly as possible undertaking the various improvements that are outlined in the audit.
Mr. Griffin and Ms. Kleiner are going to talk about more of the details but | thought | would take a few moments
to kind of set the stage for what we are talking about. First the audit was done of the Assessing Department in
Nashua. The Assessing Department did not do the recent revaluation; that was done by KRT. Because of
issues that we had identified actually together, we discussed this when the money was appropriated to bring
KRT in, we decided to go outside the City for the evaluation to engage an expert assessing firm, KRT, who had
extensive experience in New England and in New Hampshire to do the work. There were various reasons for
that and | believe it was the right decision because the work that they did, | think the facts show are very sound.
They have come up with a very consistent set of results and they did a very thorough job. They visually
inspected every property; now of course they did not go into the properties, but they visually inspected every
property. Working with the personnel office in terms of identify any discrepancies that are visually apparent
from the outside of the building, because Lynn in the Assessing Office routinely reviews photographs to
determine if there is anything visible on the outside that is not in the property records, | think they were able to
