A regular meeting of the Board of Aldermen was held Tuesday, January 26, 2016, at 7:30 p.m. in the
Aldermanic Chamber.
President Brian S. McCarthy presided; City Clerk Patricia D. Piecuch recorded.
Prayer was offered by City Clerk Patricia D. Piecuch; Alderman-at-Large Mark S. Cookson led in the
Pledge to the Flag.
The roll call was taken with 15 members of the Board of Aldermen present
Mayor James W. Donchess and Corporation Counsel Stephen M. Bennett were also present.
REMARKS BY THE MAYOR
Mayor Donchess
First | wanted to point out the report we put on your desk regarding what we are calling the Opioid Task
Force meeting that we held last week. We called together people from prevention, treatment, recovery,
and law enforcement and we’ve given you a list of the people who attended in order to try to improve
communications a health crisis in our community. The meeting went very well. | think we did identify
communication gaps that exist. We talked about additional things that we can do in the city. | think that
people are working so hard in their various areas that often they don’t meet each other and have an
opportunity to talk with each other. Specifically | think we can do more with the outreach effort of working
with the Nashua Prevention Coalition. Also, trying to stimulate the greater availability of treatment beds
in our region and recovery support for people who have emerged from treatment after 28 or 90 days or
even longer and need support in their daily lives as time goes on. In any event, it is a very important
issue and | wrote this up for you so you could get a sense, if you wish to read it, what the kind of things
that were discussed and just let you know that | think it went well and we will be holding future meetings.
Number two is that we’ve gone through five Ward input meetings in Wards 9, 1, 6, 7 and 4 in that order.
I’ve only fallen once going into the meetings and so only one torn pair of pants so far. | think things are
going very well. We've had a number of members of the Board who have come. Alderman McCarthy
and Alderman Wilshire have been to all of them. Alderman O’Brien has been to nearly all of them and
the Ward Alderman have come from each of the Wards where we’ve held the meeting. A lot of people
have come and they have given us some very positive input and very interesting thoughts about what
their hopes are and what they think is important to the city as well as some neighborhood problems that
we want to try to address going forward. We have the Ward 3 meeting tomorrow night, the Ward 5
meeting on Thursday and then subsequent Wards 8 and 2. | hope anyone who can attend will and |
think you will learn something.
Finally | wanted to update you on the building we purchased on Burke Street. Of course we want to
move forward with that project as soon as we can. | asked the Director of Public Works, Lisa Fauteux to
put together a group of people to define the project for us and so Alderman Deane and Paul Bergeron
from the Board of Public Works are working with Lisa and some other staff members to define the project
and will begin with making a recommendation to this Board, to the Finance Committee regarding what
architect should be chosen to proceed with that project. There was an issue that came up this past week
or so regarding the building. As you probably know the building that we acquired includes a very large
garage along with a 50,000 square foot office building. At this point while we are waiting to decide
exactly how to proceed and what to do to renovate this facility, the office building is heated and
sprinkered but the main garage is not. The issue came up if the garage should be heated and
sprinklered and the information we came up with was first of all that we can increase the insurance on
the entire facility to $12 million which gives us good coverage. We bought it for $4.2 million. In addition
the cost of heating the garage so that we could sprinkler it would be $100,000 in addition to regular utility
cost between now and the spring and furthermore the heating system is not very good at this point so
that if we were to sprinkler it the pipes might freeze causing water damage and thirdly if there were a fire
