Special Board of Aldermen 12-21-2020 Page 17
Michael Buckley Thank you President Wilshire, Board of Aldermen, thank you for the opportunity to
speak. I’ve listened to a lot of people; a lot of people had a lot of good things to say. There is a few
more things to consider, some of it will be redundant but | understand what the last gentleman’s
comments were and appreciate them as well as Dr. Cappetta, good comments. But you know when you
force people out of the bars, | mean let’s face it, with the timing of this I’d say it’s really, it will affect my
business of course like Michael Somers said if it’s a 9:30 curfew, people will think, Oh | can’t really, |
don’t want to bother going at 8:00 or 8:30 because I’m going to be forced out of the restaurant. We will
see an impact from it, no doubt. We've already been impacted greatly and our numbers are not good
this year. | appreciate what the Mayor and the City has done for the downtown this summer and that
was fantastic. But that was a few months that helped us for those few months but previous to that and
since then with the cold weather it has been really drastic.
So I'll start by saying or reiterate the fact that if you close the bars in Nashua people will go to
Manchester or go to Hudson; they'll go wherever, they will go other places. But where | think they will
really go, you have a group of young people that are at bars and having a good time and feeling good,
they are going to go to people’s houses. They are going to be, hey you know, let’s all go back to my
place and you are going to see possibly, you know, 10, 20, 30 people in somebody’s apartment without
masks which | think is far worse than what we are talking about here with some structure in these
establishments. Keep in mind, bar owners are business people too. They are entrepreneurs, a lot of
them are younger entrepreneurs, a lot of them are struggling like the rest of us. They have been
struggling for a long time now and some of them are probably on the brink.
So I'd like to say, you know, if there’s people that have been not conforming or abusing what is going on
and you see things, have you tried to work with these people? How hard have you tried to work with
them? Remember they are the business people of tomorrow, a lot of them, they are business people
right now. We don’t need to be driving anybody out of business especially when the alternative is going
to people’s apartments or wherever else they are going.
So | would stress maybe working with them. If you have really problem proprietors then maybe you
need to take some action if that’s the only choice you have. But | don’t know what has been tried so far
but I'll implore you to work with people versus destroying, you know, maybe their business or livelihood.
You know, we’ve seen this in other municipalities across the country, other states, other cities, where
they’ve done this or more drastic measures in a lot of areas and it doesn’t seem to have impacted the
spread at all. The spread continues to rise regardless. All they have managed to do is put people out of
business. From what I’ve seen, correct me if I’m wrong, | haven’t seen the cases come crashing down
when they close all these restaurants and the bars down. In some places it is complete shutdowns and
it still doesn’t seem to change it.
So that needs to be kept in line. You can be putting people out of business needlessly, you know? It’s
still up for debate as to whether it is going to help at all. I’m sure all of you have been into the grocery
stores or Home Depot and everywhere else right before these last couple of storms. | mean could it get
any worse, there were people on top of people. People on top of people with all the cashiers stuck at
their posts for hours on end, touching their masks, touching your food, everybody in the store is
touching stuff, putting it down, the person behind them is touching the stuff after they touch the mask. |
don’t see that as any better than what we are doing in the restaurants where we are working very hard
to do everything that’s been required of us so far. So | think that we are under stricter control and we try
to work with that control, a lot harder than a lot of other industries.
So those are just some points | wanted to make. | know that all the Aldermen got my letter. | had already
written several days ago a letter of disapproval of this curfew and | know you have all read it. Several
Aldermen have reached out to me and commented on it. | appreciate that consideration of that letter as
well as my remarks tonight. Thank you.
