Board of Aldermen 12-22-2020 Page 29
Alderman Clemons
Thank you. | want to thank everybody again who came to speak both last night and tonight and the folks
that sent emails, phone calls, things like that. | think I’ve heard from almost 200 people at this point which
is, again, probably a record. Even when we did the mask ordinance | don’t think | heard from this many
people so it is really a record and it shows that people do pay attention to their local politics especially when
it is going to affect them. And not to say that what we don’t normally do affects them, but this is an in your
face type thing. Basically what it comes down to for me is that the protections aren’t there. We heard that
earlier | think it was either today or late yesterday that Congress passed the stimulus bill and this morning
Trump is threatening to veto it because it’s not good enough. And as we all have heard it took 9 months for
Congress to even to come this agreement and so who knows? You can’t rely on Washington, DC
unfortunately. It’s a sad state of affairs, it doesn’t matter if you are a Democrat or Republican, you just can’t
rely on Washington, DC.
And so to the point that was made earlier, it does come down to the local municipalities. What is sad is that
Nashua had to make what | call a reverse decision. And it’s reverse in the sense that we made a very hard
decision based on what Nashua could control. And what | mean by that is that there are some places out
there in Europe and in other parts of the world where they shut down the economy and the Government
made sure that people’s businesses didn’t go under, that they would be there after the pandemic was over,
that people were able to make rent, they were able to feed their families, things like that. They really
stepped up, right? In this country we decided to kind of do it, pardon my French, by in a half-assed way
and that was back in the spring and everything expired pretty much in the middle of the summer.
So Nashua was faced with a decision, what are we going to do? Do we close down all of our restaurants
and bars? Do we close down the places that bring income to our citizens? What is the alternative? We
went with the alternative, the alternative was to close down our schools. We have control over that. We
can make sure our kids are taken care of, it’s not ideal but we were able to pull together, get the resources
to the public schools, makes sure that kids have internet access things like that. And that way we were
keeping that segment of the population safe because we had direct control over it. Unfortunately we don’t
have direct control over bars, we don’t have direct control over restaurants or where people go to gather.
We could try to do something here in Nashua, but people will go elsewhere, people will find alternatives,
they will do what they want to do. We can shut everything down if wanted to here in the City and it would
have very little affect other than to inconvenience people from having to go somewhere else.
| wish that we lived in a world where our Government cared about people enough where they could —
where we could say, yeah you know what, Boston Billiards it's going to be OK because we are going to
make sure we take care of you, we are going to make Sure that we take care of your employees and while
we are shut down you are all going to get paid. You know the charities are going to be taken care of, you
rents are going to be paid, utilities will be paid all that stuff and then when this pandemic comes over, you
will go back and be right back in business where you were. Unfortunately we don’t have a Government that
works that way. And it’s telling and it is sad because we pay a lot of money in taxes. So we have to
prioritize here in Nashua what we do. And what we can control.
And in my opinion we have done a pretty good job doing that. | was against the mask ordinance, however,
| do think that | agree with some of my colleagues who have stated that we ought to begin enforcing that.
I’ve always said that a low fine, | tried to amend the ordinance when it first came in to a low fine, because |
believe that is something that on a first offense would not be overburdened to somebody. And in addition
to that would probably make compliance a little better and | also support harsher punishment on the
businesses that are just blatantly refusing to support the laws that we made. | mean I’ve been in to plenty of
places and | have been told by different people that there businesses and they just don’t care about the
mask ordinance, they don’t care. They don’t follow health guidelines, they don’t follow social distancing
rules. Well, you know what? We ought to fine those places. We ought to go into those places and revoke
their occupancy permits, because you know what? There are places like Martha’s, Boston Billiards, Lui Lui,
The Flight Center, places like Liquid Therapy that follow the social distancing rules, follow the guidelines.
