Board of Aldermen
February 23, 2016 Page 15
cut everything exactly the same and have the same size pie if everything is suddenly bigger but | think we
should take a more careful look at prioritizing which pieces need to be bigger for the given situation that we find
ourselves in. | do know that over the last year or two that the Nashua Police Department has shown a lot of
leadership, particularly in working with the minority communities. New Hampshire has the second largest
number of trained police officers and that is, in part, due to Nashua’s leadership. That’s a badge of honor for
us and when | say trained | mean trained in dealing with minorities and youth intervention. New Hampshire is
one of the only states in the country that has a positive change in minority incarceration. In other words we
have less minority youth showing up in the criminal justice system. There are plenty programs that are working
to provide after school care and court diversion and all that kind of stuff but the people who deal with the
situations when they deal with youth and minorities first in the legal system is the police officers so making sure
that they are well trained and well supervised and part of a program that reflects the needs of our community is
where my Ward and voters | think are most interested. | personally am supporting this and | hope the other
Aldermen do too because our police do a very good job and we don’t want to cut it back to the point where
they are no longer doing a good job, we want to keep them doing a good job.
Alderman LeBrun
| too have the greatest respect for our police department. We do have a quality police department and | also
have respect for a subcommittee and the Budget Review Committee did a good job on this, they came back
with a unanimous vote to accept this contract and for that reason | will support it.
Alderman Schoneman
| wanted to make clear if | didn’t before that | have full confidence in our police department, | think it’s an
excellent force. | thank Heaven every day that we have an excellent police department. The issue has nothing
to do with the quality of the force, in fact, it’s a quality force and whatever their pay was they will continue to be
a quality force and that’s because they have good character. The issue is just that it’s very hard for these
contracts to grow and maintain services because the spending cap is real. It’s a guideline where in a system
where there is no market competition, no force is at play, there has to be some measure for growth and the
growth that was determined by voters here in the city and reaffirmed a couple of years ago produces a formula
that says that the growth in public spending will match the growth of private spending and presumably private
income growth so that’s the problem.
Alderman McGuinness
| voted for the contract on Thursday night. Alderman Schoneman is correct, it wasn’t really all that happy; it
was more of a reluctant vote. The arguments there that this is going to happen anyway resonated with
everyone and | will acknowledge that from what | understand some of the negotiations that went on in
preparing this contract, we did get some concessions with insurance and vacation time and | know that Deputy
Chief Michael Carignan worked very hard on that but the fact remains that it’s way over the cap. | did vote for
it and | think we have the finest police department in the State of New Hampshire. Some of my concerns were
the disparity between the patrolmen’s contract and supervisor’s contract and you want to make sure there is a
spread there...that’s legitimate to me. | think it’s an argument of merit. | don’t want to see the supervisor’s
being penalized because they are in positions of management and authority. Alderman Clemons, | did run on
a position that | would not go over the spending cap and that’s important to me. | understand what Alderman
Moriarty is saying, it’s all one pie, some get more and some get less. We all know what hit the paper on
Monday, every citizen in Nashua knows that the school budget is going to be way over so where are we going
from here? | started to think after reading that article and perhaps | could be persuaded otherwise. Again, |
don’t want to take anything away from the finest police department in the State of New Hampshire and |
respect what the chief and the deputy chief had done as well as some of the commissioners but | am having
considerations right now of flipping my vote.
