Special Board of Aldermen 07-01-2021 Page 12
solve problems including the problems that the State drops on us because partisan politics, people may be
trying to create a certain narrative about our performance as Aldermen. Regardless of how well we do
with our budget, the narrative is definitely going to be, we raised taxes, we spent more money.
And the culprits for are not the ones who are responsible for it. The State Representatives who are not our
elected State Representatives, we are already hearing people trying to blame the Fire Department for
wanting raises when they are trying to maintain a level of service, likely knowing that this budget doesn’t
actually account for their contract negotiations or that kind of stuff specifically. They are trying to make
sure the response time is effective. We just had a fire yesterday on Prescott Street, if a house burns down
that’s not going to be a — oh let’s elect a new person next year. That’s a tragedy and that’s potential lives
lost. The response time for Nashua Fire was criticized in public comment earlier. | know last week they
managed to catch a mattress that was on fire in a very heavily populated building with a lot of disabled
people in it before it caused more damage than just to that unit, coming right through downtown, right
through Main Street. The building is located on West Pearl.
So Nashua Fire does a lot of work. They have been responding to a lot of calls, even in the middle of a
hurricane or whatever you want to call yesterday’s flash storm. And we need to keep that service intact
because lives depend on it, that’s not where you want to cut. The Nashua Police from the State
perspective, they may be saying, OH well let’s fully fund the pension program even though we don’t need
20% of the total program to keep it sustainable by any measure, let’s do that because we feel like doing it
but the impact on the ground is now Nashua PD is supposed to not upgrade their command center, not
continue to make sure that they have compatible equipment with other parts of emergency response
systems? They just made some major arrests yesterday of people who are involved in cocaine trafficking,
felons that owned multiple firearms, they have been managing a number of increasing domestic terror
threats in the City including white supremacy actions and intimidating behaviors that have actually started
to penetrate even into our own public meetings.
This is not a good idea to cut resources from them because somebody on a sub-committee decided that
they wanted to play games and maybe make a point. These are services we need for our Nashua
residents that result in tragedy or catastrophe when we aren’t able to provide them. | have made many,
many comments about how we need more resources for people who are homeless and we need more
resources for people who are struggling to make their rent or facing homelessness eviction. Alderman
Klee mentioned the HOME funds. Those are important programs and that’s not just our score on a wallet
hub survey. That’s what our residents and what our taxpayers deserve. And if the intention of expanding
our budget so that we can accept tax money that these taxpayers already paid to the Federal Government
that we are returning in exchange for services into specific areas, that benefits them and | think it is
something we need to do. | don’t think we should hamstring our own budget because somebody in
Concord decided to take away the rights of Nashua taxpayers to repair or manage their own spending cap
and just imposed it on us in what | think is a pretty unusual manner.
So | think the motions that are made are reasonable and | think the costs that are associated are essential
and has been stated multiple times, this is grant money that is not going to increase the taxpayer's bill.
President Wilshire
Alderman Dowd?
Alderman Dowd
Yes, | would just like to reiterate so it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle here. We had a goldenrod copy of R-
21-142 and the motion | made to change the items in the budget book as was pointed out by Mr. Griffin
allowed to change the numbers in the golden rod copy and | think the motion is to accept the motion that
was made and accept the golden rod copy with the new numbers in it before finally vote on the budget.
