Special Board of Aldermen 12-21-2020 Page 43
serious matter, if we pass this ordinance they will enforce it. So the argument that the Police can’t enforce
this or the Department of Health can’t enforce this, that’s not a reason not to do this. There may be other
reasons but | am going to support our Board of Health, | am going to support people who | think know a lot
more about this than | do and to tell these doctors who are volunteers that — thank you for your
recommendation but we are going to, we think we know better, | think is a slap in their faces and | think is
not the intelligent way of approaching this very, very serious pandemic. Thank you, Madam President.
Unidentified chatter Time is up.
President Wilshire
Sorry for the interruption. Would you please not interrupt when the Aldermen are speaking, you are not
helping your case any. Alderman Lopez?
Alderman Lopez
| agree with Alderman Jette specifically that the Government is not doing enough; | hope some help is
coming. | am glad it took them 9 months to actually get around to this second half a stimulus that we’ve all
known was coming. As far as | have been watching Public Health has been saying we are going to have a
huge wave of outbreak in the fall since the spring. We have been continually warned about this and | mean
| personally am not waiting for Washington to figure out what they are doing because it takes them forever.
And | don’t think the State is positioned either to act quickly that’s why | am particularly motivated to do at
least something that we can, specific to Nashua to protect Nashua because that’s something | can do. |
think Government indifference or Government politicking has been going on all year and this is a heavily
self-inflicted wound not only because we didn’t take steps to prevent outbreaks before they really broke out.
But then we also had extremely mixed messaging on what we were supposed to do in order to combat this
thing and it’s made people extremely divisive. While Alderman Jette was talking, | don’t know if everybody
else sees it and to be frank | don’t know if that would be considered public comment or not but there is a lot
of comments popping up about people who are overtly stating that they are not going to stay away from their
families for Christmas they are absolutely going to do whatever they want and it is up to the person who is
worried to stay home. And that’s the problem, we are giving a platform for people to interact and make their
own choices on behalf of everybody else in the room. To shed a little bit of light on what was discussed in
some of the Board of Health Meetings that might have kind of gotten buried is the justification for the 9:30
timeframe, it was originally 9:00 and that was not because just Massachusetts had a curfew, it was brought
to our attention at the time from somebody working in a restaurant that we were getting a whole bunch of
people coming up and we needed to be worried about super spreader events before Thanksgiving because
after 9:00 there’s this whole bunch of people.
But the justification that the Board of Health was actually paying attention to was the reasoning that
Massachusetts put that curfew in place in the first place. Massachusetts didn’t just spin a wheel and put
9:00 on there either, they looked at times of risk and exposure and what can they do to limit the spread
without impairing their entire business and their infrastructure. | am approaching this more from a
perspective that at the growth rate that we are seeing, we are going to have much more draconian
measures put in place at some point if we don’t stop what is happening now. We saw a massive surge after
Thanksgiving, we are seeing that surge continue into Christmas. New Years is another major drinking
holiday, so we are looking at an upcoming period of at least two weekends where there’s a major holiday
and there’s going to be a lot of people who are interested in going out and celebrating. And then yeah after
that they are probably going to go to house parties and all that kind of stuff, whereas if they didn’t get started
and they weren't already intoxicated, they are more likely to make safer decisions or to think things through
a little bit more clearly than they would be after having a couple of drinks and being out at 11:00 and having
met somebody at a bar that they want to continue the night with.
