Special Board of Aldermen 07-01-2021 Page 22
But more specifically the actions and the reputation and the performance of the Fire Department does
specifically benefit people’s insurance premiums and that is a financial value. | think they’ve been asking for
another fire station for years and we have not been able to even approach finding the resources for that. But
being able to make sure that they are keeping up with the training of the fire department that they have
without overextending their existing staff as it expands to respond to calls with taller and more complex
buildings that we are authorizing — that’s being frugal, that’s being efficient and that’s being responsible.
This year of all years, doesn’t mean that there is going to be less fire just because Concord decided that
they were going to play a little fast and loose with our ability to self-govern Nashua. There have been more
fires | believe, there have been more incidents, we just got through a major heat wave. And again,
yesterday we had a fire in the middle of a rain storm.
So | don’t think that the bottom line of the Fire Department is going to be contingent to politics. | think we
need to be looking at the needs that they present and what they are actually going to do with the money. |
don’t think they are asking for anything ridiculous, if we have events and people are coming out of COVID-
19 and restaurants are trying to recover from economic damage and they want to bring in as many people
as possible, we should probably have somebody there to manage that occupancy so that we don’t have to
call all of the fire companies to deal with a major first aid disaster or a major event. Recently the Fire
Department has been called for mutual aid calls in some pretty big situations in other cities too when those
cities found that they didn’t have the capability to respond themselves and that’s not something we should
be entertaining.
| think, again, some neighborhoods are different. Mine has a lot of older buildings, has a lot of older citizens
in those buildings who may not have the same access to using stairs quickly or mobility or that kind of thing.
So using the example from a couple of weeks ago, what was stopped immediately as a mattress fire could
have been a devastating event which as a City, would have cost the taxpayers a lot more to respond to and
would have cost the families and the associates of the people involved even more. So | support their
request and | don’t think that the minimal impact that it would have on the individual tax bill is equivalent to
the services that the offer. | think it is important that we actually make difficult decisions in terms of
governance. And that doesn’t just mean figuring out what we can cut and tell ourselves we made a good
decision, it also means having the courage to say there are some services that are very important. Their
services are important and we are going to match all the rhetoric we give in support of them with actual
action supporting them.
President Wilshire
Alderman Klee?
Alderman Klee
Thank you again Madam President. | just want to make a comment. When we talk about the possibility of
having to close a fire station and knowing that all the reports of recent time are telling us we should increase
by 2 fire stations, | get a little anxious. | know | had someone kind of joke to me and said “how would you
like it if the Amherst Fire Department was one of those that had closed”. And | said, “no it is the most historic
one, it’s got to stay there and | will fight for that”. But then | look back at recent times within the past month
there was in one 24 hour period there were two (inaudible — audio interference) in Ward 3. One on Concord
Street where the entire home is gone. That family has been displaced and luckily we had no damage to the
buildings that were very close to it and that was because we had fast response from the Amherst Street Fire
Department. They are right there, right around the corner and no other homes were lost; that one was sadly
lost. And it is part of the historic district and it brings a tear every time | drive by it. And then Leighton
Street. We had a fire there that ended up with a lot of water damage and those people had to be displaced
and so on.
That was within a 24 hour period; one happened very early in the morning and one happened in the
afternoon, | think it was. If that Fire Department had not been there, would we have lost more, would we
