Board of Aldermen 01-25-2022 Page 17
written and the sound you hear is the person erasing what was just said the last week before. Again, it’s changing. Any
questions you might have? Thank you for consideration. Again if you want to hear from the staff, please.
Alderman Klee
Thank you Madam Chair and this question may be for Corporation Counsel. I’ve gotten a lot of phone calls relative to the
previous mandate and this is basically just an extension of it. Defining businesses and so on and did that also include
churches and private schools within the city limits obviously?
Steve Bolton, Corporation Counsel
We in the Legal Department have discussed this and we believe it would not include churches or would include private
schools.
Alderman Klee
Thank you.
Alderman Comeau
Thank you Madam President. In preparation for the meeting tonight, | have been doing a lot of thought to the term
“representative government” and how to interpret that. | know it’s not feasible or practical to entertain the idea of sending
every ordinance and resolution to the public for a vote every time that we discuss something so they depend on us to do
that for them. There’s basically two ways that I’ve come up with that you can look at that. The first is that they ask
somebody to go and make their decisions for them and the second possible interpretation is that they ask somebody to go
deliver their voice. So which one are we? | think that it’s probably both. The right answer to most things is it’s in the
middle. It’s both. It depends on the situation. If there’s a topic that we’re debating that we feel that the public is 50/50 on,
| think they expect us because they voted for us to vote our conscious, our ideals, and our values.
However if there’s a topic that’s overwhelmingly lopsided, | think that we’re doing a disservice to the public when we
ignore their very loud voice. So I’ve done a little bit of looking at some of these numbers and | know that we all get the
same e-mails. So we’ve all been reading them over the last week or two. Over 90 percent of the e-mail correspondence
that we’ve gotten is for us to vote no on this. | personally have received 100 percent of the correspondence to my
personal e-mail that was asking us to vote no on this. | kept track of the speakers tonight. It was about 70 percent
against and | did do a very, very informal poll on the Nashua Scoop which is the largest social media site in Nashua.
They have membership from every ward, of every political belief. They are roughly 50 percent larger than the next largest
group with 15,000 members and over 70 percent of the respondents to that poll are opposed to this mandate with
hundreds of responses in the last 12 hours.
| think that it’s our responsibility as public servants to serve the public. I’m not going to debate whether masks work, or
the science, or anything like that because I’m wildly unqualified to do so. We've been asked to represent the public and
it's very clear what the public wants. | don’t think there’s any debate about what the majority of the public wants us to do
and it’s our responsibility to do that. Thank you.
Alderwoman Kelly
Thank you. | actually wanted to start out the gentleman from the Board of Health really did an incredible job and you
started off by saying I’m sorry. | just wanted to say thank you not just for serving but for really putting out why you put this
ordinance in front of us.
It’s going to come as no Surprise to anybody that | support this. | support our health workers. | support our Board of
Health and the job that they are asked to do. They are experts in their field and they are here like any other department
head whether it’s the Chief of Police, the Chief of Fire. If they’re telling us that this is the appropriate thing to do, then |
100 percent am going to be backing that. Thank you.
Alderman Dowd
Yeah I’m just going to make a couple points. One is | don’t think anybody likes wearing masks. | think if you took a vote,
nobody likes wearing masks. So that’s a given. | know | don’t like wearing masks. However, a couple of points. One —
we had a big scare. We had a family gathering and one of my 12 year old granddaughters came down with COVID. It put
the whole family in lockdown. Fortunately she had been fully vaccinated and it was a mild case. No one else came down
