Board of Aldermen 02-08-2022 Page 15
of people don’t know about. It’s part of Alderman Caron’s Ward and now Alderman Cathey’s Ward. Once the winter is
over, | encourage people to make use of it. It’s a beautiful area right in the middle of the city and it’s one of the gems that
the city has.
On another note like all of you, I’ve received many, many e-mails about the mask issue primarily. | was saying to my wife
a lot of these e-mails there’s no address so | don’t — you know somebody was complaining that their Ward Alderman had
not responded to them. | said gee | don’t even know who this Ward Alderman might be because there’s no address
provided. To the public that might be listening, it's much more effective when you write an e-mail to the Aldermen if you
include your address so we know where you live. Are you part of our Ward or not? | Know it’s probably parochial of me to
say this but | pay more attention to e-mails | receive from people in my Ward. | don’t know if other people feel the same
way. Just a recommendation to people if you want your e-mail to have more of an impact, tell us who you are and where
you live so that we can respond appropriately. Thank you.
Alderman Lopez
(inaudible) what Alderman Jette said, | am elected as a Ward Alderman so | do attend to the needs of my constituents and
| generally will refer them to their Ward Alderman if their positions or needs for representations can also be served by that
advocate. So | also received a couple of e-mails. | had one over the weekend where a person e-mailed me just from a
Hotmail account and | said | need your name, and your number, and your address, and all that kind of stuff just so that |
can put this into context. They were like well the fact that | wrote an e-mail should suggest to you that it matters enough
to me to... was like okay but | still don’t’ know who you are. They responded basically you're an idiot. So | was like well
okay that’s been said before but at the same time, | don’t have any contact for it. As a Ward Alderman, | will put the
needs of my constituents first when | can figure out who they are. | trust the At-Large Aldermen to look at the whole city
perspective and | think if people have strong opinions about issues and maybe from other places like Hollis, Merrimack,
and whatever and they come to Nashua and they feel a sense of entitlement to be here, that’s fair. We'd like to know that
we have visitors who have strong opinions but they also have their own elected officials and they have a State-wide
officials. If you give us information, we may not necessarily 100 percent agree with you but we can at least send you in
the right direction so that you can find some satisfaction.
With regard to the comments about making motions in meetings and | understand we can essentially suspend the rules or
introduce things when we want to but | would just point out that if you don’t’ put it on the agenda, the public doesn’t know
that it’s going to be on the agenda. We may inadvertently may rob people of the opportunity to provide public comment
on the issue. So typically we are careful about how we expedite things when there’s an emergency versus when there is
not necessarily a life threatening emergency or risk to people making sure that both sides have the opportunity to know
what’s going to be discussed and have the opportunity to present their opinions. That’s just something | wanted to make
note of.
| had a questions for Attorney Bolton regarding the non-public sessions. As | understood it, the communication we
received was an alert that a vendor was expressing his concern. | did not get elected as a judge, jury, or whatever so it
was just a communication to the effect of the vendor who identified himself was reporting that a member of the public had
communicated with them. If we take that in a non-public session in order to more fairly vet it, can we invite the member of
the public that’s participating? Do we have to invite the other member of the public who’s communicating with us? Do we
have to host like a fight? How does that work?
Steve Bolton, Corporation Counsel
You may do things. You're not required to do those things.
Alderman Lopez
Okay. | have questions about changing policies and procedures. It just doesn’t seem like things we happen to have
every day. | think it was noted by Alderman Cathey. | didn’t see a smoking gun that now a crime was documented in our
public records. It’s just a concern that was raised by a vendor that we should leave it to the police to investigate so that
they can figure out what both sides are as is their role.
We have reference to that the mask mandate being unenforceable. | did speak to Deputy Rourke about that. We’ve had
some public comment and some public communications where individuals document places that they go to that don’t
enforce the mask mandate. | would just point out that the sign is part of the ordinance that a business is required to put
the sign on but we didn’t make the businesses responsible for enforcing the ordinance. If a member of the public is
concerned, they can call the police. The police will respond. They will document their response and they'll investigate the
situation and intervene if necessary. | would also point out though to have reasonable expectations for the police because
we can report fireworks as a city ordinance but by the time anybody gets on the scene, the fireworks have already flung
