Special Board of Aldermen 12-21-2020 Page 45
Unidentified Speaker interrupts
President Wilshire
Mr. Mathias, please don’t speak out of turn.
Alderman Lopez
| am just going to resolve by saying if people can’t even obey the courtesies of a meeting, how are we really
putting our faith of people’s lives in them, how they are obeying these courtesies socially. Everybody has a
different opinion, passions override, people are really tired of COVID-19 and all of these restrictions and
believe me, | get that. But that doesn’t mean that we can just ignore it or turn our gaze away. If we have a
public health crisis we need to treat it as a public health crisis and work with businesses that are unfairly
impacted the way that they deserve to be.
President Wilshire
Alderman Laws.
Alderman Laws
Thank you, Madam President and thank you everyone who has spoken tonight. There’s a lot of really
compelling testimony. | am going to be super brief. | will say that | agree with Alderman Jette and Alderman
Lopez that the numbers aren't lying and there is an issue with bars. But that’s not what we are talking about
right now, what we are talking about is implementing a curfew on bars and restaurants and | haven’t seen
any data or numbers that say that there is a correlation there between the curfew and those numbers and
bars being opened later. If you are leaving most be a vast majority of the places that serve food and alcohol
open to operate during most of their business hours anyway, all day long, you are not doing anything to
combat this.
If you want to have a debate about whether or not we should be working towards finding some economic
stimulus to help restaurants and employees stay home so we can curb the spread of the virus by closing
down bars and restaurants, | am all for that debate, | am willing to have it, | am looking forward to it. But we
are not talking about that, we are talking about a curfew. The Board of Health, who | have nothing but
respect for, | mean Director Bagley had her g-tip so far up my nose this week that it scratched my brain, |
finish every conversation | have with her which are far more frequent than | am sure she would like with
“Thank you for everything that you do” because she is amazing and | know that they are under a lot of
stress.
But that being said, them saying that we should have a curfew is kind of the same thing as them saying
everybody should wear a pirate hat. There’s no correlation between the curfew bringing down the numbers
and how it is going to affect the COVID numbers in Nashua, it’s just kind of a —| don’t want to call it a knee
jerk reaction but it’s just kind of you need to do something because the numbers are out of control. So as
far as the curfew is concerned | am 100% rally against it. No one has made a compelling argument for it yet
so until that happens, that’s where | am going to be. Thank you all very much.
President Wilshire
Thank you Alderman Laws. Anyone else that wishes to speak? Alderman Tencza?
Alderman Tencza
Thank you. Just briefly so | am of the opinion and | don’t support the curfew or this Legislation. | agree
though that if we could go back and have much more input from our Public Health Departments and let them
control a little bit more, not just here in Nashua but regionally and nationally we would be much better off
