Special Board of Aldermen 12-21-2020 Page 23
close and get rid of all of their employees and never open again to this is going to hurt them and they are
going to have to scale back and only the single mothers are going to be the ones who hurt. We are hearing
a lot of claims that are going all over the map from one side while expecting a perfect understanding of
public health to come from another and | don’t think that’s a fair status quo. | think Public Health has made
recommendations and provided data based on those recommendations. | think as Aldermen, we’ve been
here before. If anybody has a short memory, the first time we passed the masking ordinance we had a lot
of public opposition to that too that was specifically organized to be against that. When we had to pass the
amendment to the mask ordinance, because people weren't taking it on themselves to actually do it and
restaurants were enabling that, specifically according to the complaints that we had. We still got a lot of
pushback from that. And even after we passed that ordinance the State of NH came in, just prior to
enacting its own Statewide Mask Ordinance and fined several places that they had been investigating
repeatedly that are pretty defiant and still maintaining that it is impossible to expect anybody to wear a
mask if they are standing next to an oven.
So the restaurant industry has had a learning curve as has everybody else. | don’t think they are the only
industry in the entire City of Nashua that has put considerable amounts of money and resources into
personal protective equipment. | would argue that probably nursing homes, hospitals, any human services,
our own City Hall, has also implemented extremely strict oversight. | know a lot of programs have just
straight up closed. | know that most of the year the Senior Center was closed. Hearts Peer Support has
been closed, the library has struggled. So this is something that is affecting the entire community, it’s not
just the restaurant industry. We aren’t targeting the restaurant industry because it’s a restaurant industry,
we are targeting it because it is the industry that doesn’t have to wear masks when they are doing
business. That’s how the ordinance is written specifically. Now we have, as was referenced by one of the
speakers, asked about the possibility of some places that might be able to do business while wearing
masks of a different kind such as gambling or that type of thing. And that is going to be up to the
businesses of whether they are open to it and whether they can come up with a business model for it.
If their business model says that they need to close entirely for the entire day instead of cutting three hours
off in the evening which were identified as the highest risk due to mostly drinking and not eating food at
restaurants or dining or that kind of thing then that’s unfortunate and that’s something that we do have to
look at from an economic perspective. But this is the Board of Public Health. We are being given a
recommendation for public health reasons. Our failings when it comes to economic supports and coming
up with creative ways to help businesses in the wintertime, the same way we did over the summer and our
failings at social structures and social supports, whether we are using the COVID money that was given to
our State specifically to address COVID needs, to help people keep from getting behind on their rent or not,
whether we are marketing that to people. Those are different issues. We need to be having those issues
be tackled by those Committees and with those recommendations both as an economic issue. Our Board
has a Planning & Economic Development Committee which should have been meeting to discuss this and
as a Human Affairs issue where we look at, these are extraordinary times, maybe we need to be making
sure that more people can access the supportive services we have. Personally, my job is to be an
Alderman and to focus on the City of Nashua. | know there are several state representatives here who have
that larger scope at the State level. So | am sure they can take action when they are in session, but | don’t
have any faith in the State helping us.
When they said they were going to help with extra unemployment, they immediately implemented a system
of overloading their own unemployment system and then trying to stagger out the number of people who
could apply for it based on the last letter of their name and other witchcraft. Most people didn’t even get the
benefits that they were entitled to and just gave up. But those are the systems that should be in place and
that’s where we should be applying our effort if we are going to be looking at a statewide approach. With
regards to a statewide mandate, | mean the data in Nashua and our Public Health Department is
recommending we do that here. | don’t know what is happening at the State level, but | do know that the
logic of saying, well one City shouldn’t do anything because the state isn’t doing anything is the same that
the state of Massachusetts faces, why should Massachusetts put a curfew in when the entire country isn’t
doing that?
