Special Board of Aldermen 12-21-2020 Page 31
Now having said that, if you'll indulge me I’d like to kind of make some comments here. One is under no
circumstances do | believe our Board of Health members ever made a knee jerk reaction. | think they made
a thoughtful reaction based on what their job is. Their job is to keep the public safe and | believe that that’s
exactly what their intent is. Now while | don’t feel that action even goes far enough, | think what we need to
do is much what Alderman Schmidt and Alderman Clemons brought up and | have already spoken to Legal
about (audio cuts out) fines and pushing towards that. I’ve spoken to Chief Carignan, I’ve spoken to many of
the shop owners, saying that — be prepared, because | want to kind of come down harder than we have
been able to. | don’t know how that’s going to come out, | don’t know how the vote is going to come and |
don’t know how the other Board members feel as | have not spoken to them about it. But | have started that
process to try to get something in that really will push this down.
| did ask at the Board of Health is it too little too late, | kind of got that feeling that yes it is a little too late, but
| don’t think that should stop this. | think we still have to go forward. You know, this has truly been the
hardest decision | think that | — | have been such a strong advocate for masks. | like to consider myself the
Queen of Masks. | know some people would call me maybe the masked nagger or goodness gracious
probably something even worse. But the bottom line is that | believe in masks, | believe in social distancing,
| believe in doing everything that we can but | don’t believe that just because there’s a certain group of
people in restaurants and so on that are not wearing masks, that they are any worse than some of the
places I’ve seen. | just went to a store today and while almost everybody there had the mask, there were
two people that had masks with their nose hanging out. One was a mother that young children with her and
it just surprised me that she would do that. Her children had masks on but her nose was hanging out of the
mask. And not one person at that store said anything.
I’ve gotten calls from people who have gone to small convenience stores who employees as well as people
who aren’t wearing masks. | think that’s really where we have to come down. And that’s why | kind of put the
ordinance through is to not single out a single entity, a business entity but to really, in fact, kind of look at
that. And | do want to make one clarification, someone said something about the churches and so on, to the
best of my knowledge, churches have to wear masks and they are doing social distancing. And our
ordinance says, if | am not mistaken, | don’t really have it right in front of me, so | apologize, | put it off to the
side and put something on it. But basically our ordinance that they are trying to put through here says “any
activity that cannot be done without a mask after 9:30 p.m.”. So even if there were church at 9:30 p.m. they
would not be shut down. So that’s really what this all comes down to. So that would mean that if a
restaurant or another business such as a casino would be willing to operate while people kept their masks
on they could stay open. The bottom line is who is going to go to a restaurant where you can’t take your
mask off and so on.
| think we can do better, | think we can do better as a community and | think this is a wakeup call that we
may need to do something. But | also agree that people are going to leave Nashua and are going to go to
other places that aren’t quite as stringent as we are and then they are going to bring it back here and they
are going to meet with their families and so on. So for that reason | just can’t support this. So thank you.
President Wilshire
Thank you, Alderman Dowd.
Alderwoman Kelly
Alderman Wilshire, | had my hand up as a follow-up to my question like two minutes ago.
President Wilshire
Alderman Kelly, go ahead.
