By DAVE SOLOMON, Granite State News Collaborative
It might sound like the start of a joke, but a lawyer, an electrician and a retired police officer walked into the race to be the next mayor of Nashua, and they are creating the city’s first interesting mayoral contenst since 2015.
At the time, attorney Jim Donchess, a Democrat, soundly defeated Republican Chris Williams, who had served eight years as president of the Greater Nashua Chamber of Commerce. Donchess had already served two terms as Nashua’s 51st mayor from 1984 to 1992 and was sworn in as the city’s 56th mayor in 2016 and ran unopposed in 2019 for another four-year term.
As that term expires, Donchess finds himself facing a challenge from one candidate with an impressive resume of government service, and another who prides himself on the fact that he has none. The top two vote-getters in the Sept. 12 nonpartisan primary will appear on the ballot for the general election on Nov. 7.
Republican Hillsborough County Commissioner Mike Soucy could hardly be called an outsider. Before being elected to the three-person commission in 2022, he served as a Nashua police officer, firefighter, and alderman. Mark Gallant, a master electrician and local radio talk show host, stresses the fact that he has no government experience and has made that the cornerstone of his campaign.
“If a person decides they want to make a career out of government, they can no longer run government because their main interest becomes growing government, not serving citizens,” says Gallant. “Anyone being promoted by the Democrats is a government official. Anyone being promoted by Republicans is a government official.”
Gallant does not stake out many specific positions on the issues, arguing instead for a return to the original model of “citizen legislator,” which he says would solve most of our problems.
“The system has been designed in a way to make you think you only have two legitimate choices, the government party of Democrats or the government party of Republicans,” said Gallant. “The only time they were forced, they did it kicking and screaming. They were forced to take a private citizen and promote him, and that was with the recent election of Donald Trump.”
People should have a job and a life outside of government, run for office to serve one or two terms, and then return to private life. That’s the essence of the Gallant platform, and the only way, he says, to address burdensome taxation, homelessness, addiction and other problems facing the community.
“To me, the right answer is to debate everything out in public and give the public more input than the government,” he said. “If I get elected, I’m serving one and done. I just want to do my civic duty.”
Not exactly nonpartisan
Although the Nashua mayoral race is technically nonpartisan, neither Soucy nor Donchess makes any bones about their affiliation, although both fall to the moderate end of the spectrum in their respective parties.
“I’m a Republican, but a lot of my Republican friends call me a RINO (Republican in Name Only),” says Soucy, who sees modern U.S. politics as a football field in which most voters are gathered around the 50-yard line, while politicians have moved toward opposite goalposts.
“I have some on the far left over here, and friends on the right over there, who want nothing to do with the common good. Americans live between the 40s, a little left of center or a little right of center. If you are pragmatic and willing to enter into conversations with honorable intentions, we can work something out.”
While Donchess and Soucy both see themselves as playing the middle of the field, they have decidedly different visions of what Nashua should look like in the years ahead, particularly as regards the downtown.
Soucy has accused Donchess of pushing for a European-style downtown in Nashua, with narrower streets, slower-moving traffic and an emphasis on pedestrian access. While Donchess has promoted the Nashua Center for the Performing Arts from its inception, Soucy believes the project was ill-conceived and sold to voters by sleight-of-hand.
Donchess backed the bonding for the new arts center on Main Street and a new junior high to replace the aging Elm Street school, while Soucy believes a steady decline in school-age population made such new construction unnecessary. He cites studies that suggest the Elm Street Junior High could have been kept in operation a few years longer while the city closed as many as three elementary schools and remodeled one to create a new junior high.
Donchess says he is working to hold tax increases to 2 percent while Soucy says the city is already spending enough. “I’m going to try for a level-funded budget in my first year, and if we can reduce it, even better,” he said.
Gallant finds the debates over things like the arts center, new junior high school, and municipal budget as distractions from the key issue: lack of genuine citizen representation. “Almost everything people are arguing about, every issue, comes down to money. Never elect a government official to run government,” he said.
Nashua Performing Arts Center
When the $15.5 million bond issue to finance a new arts center went up for a vote in November 2017, it passed by 150 votes out of the more than 10,000 cast – an indication of the intense division on the issue.
“It’s so politicized at this point, you have a lot of people -- I don’t care what shows are going to go in there -- they are just not going to go,” says Soucy.
If elected, Soucy would order a top-to-bottom investigation into the finances and operating structure of the arts center, which he says has cost the Nashua taxpayers more than was initially promised and has not operated with the necessary level of transparency.
“It’s so convoluted, so complicated, the only thing I can promise the voters at this point is we are going to look at this,” he said. “I don’t know if it means bringing an attorney into it or real estate expert, but we have to let the taxpayers know what happened, with a summary that your average high school kid could read and understand.”
There’s no mystery, according to Donchess, who says the voters were told the building would cost $20 million, with $15.5 million from a municipal bond and $4.5 million from other sources, and that’s what happened. Allegations of subsequent payments by the city for rent, cost overruns and additional loans that have been kept secret “have no basis in fact,” says Donchess, who also notes that predictions of low ticket sales due to competing venues in all directions failed to materialize.
“It’s been tremendously successful in attracting visitors and investment,” says Donchess. The city’s goal was to attract 70,000 visitors a year downtown, with ticket sales in the first two months (middle of May to middle of June) averaging about 10,000 a month.”
“There have been a lot of sold-out shows; and the restaurants are doing very well on nights of performances, so it has been an incredible boost to the downtown economy,” he said.
The alternative, according to Donchess, would have been to allow the vacant Alec’s Shoes store to occupy the heart of downtown indefinitely.
“Imagine what we would have there without the Nashua Center for the Arts,” he said, Since the pandemic, he said, “no one is leasing space that big. So, on the most significant corner in the downtown, we would have a vacant, dark, white elephant making downtown look like a dead zone, and instead of that we have an incredibly alive, active, successful performing arts center.”
Gallant described the arts center project as “taking on big debt on a gamble, in the hope that it’s going to work. Once someone has already stuck you with something you have no choice but to figure out how to make it work. I would promote the hell out of it.”
Controlling taxes
As the value of commercial real estate in Nashua and elsewhere has fallen precipitously amid high vacancy rates, the value of single-family homes has skyrocketed amid some of the lowest vacancy rates on record. The result is that single-family homeowners (and, by extension, renters) are bearing a greater portion of the tax burden as properties are revalued.
Add to that the bond payments for the arts center and new junior high, along with general inflation, and there can be sticker shock when tax bills are received.
Soucy says Donchess has grown government with unnecessary projects like the arts center and junior high school. Gallant agrees with that, and claims that Soucy would be a big spender also, kowtowing to the demands of the unions he grew up with as a first responder.
If Nashua is not competitive in its pay and benefits to first responders, they will find better jobs elsewhere, counters Soucy. “I’m promoting balance between the taxpayers and union workers,” he said. “Whatever the market dictates, we are going to have to go there. We won’t be above the market, but we have to match what the other communities have.”
The city has had year-ending budget surpluses over the past three fiscal years — of $8 million, $9 million and, this year, $11 million — which Soucy sees as a sign of over-taxation.
Donchess points to the surpluses as a sign of good management, contributing to the city’s rare triple-A bond rating and its ranking as third-best-run city out of 188 in WalletHub.com’s 2023 rankings.
The last city budget was passed unanimously by a Board of Aldermen representing a wide range of ideologies. Donchess is recommending that $8 million of the surplus from the year ending June 30 go toward mitigating tax rate, “which means in the fall of 2023 we will see an increase of 2 percent, less than half the rate of inflation,” said the mayor.
Donchess also points to the city’s initiative to advance collective power purchasing with the advent of Nashua Community Power in May, with savings averaging around $25 a month per resident on electric bills.
Sidewalk dining vs. downtown traffic
If one issue more than any other illustrates the different visions for Nashua, it is perhaps the question of what Main Street should look like. Should it remain a wide thoroughfare with four lanes of traffic or become a more pedestrian-friendly destination with wider sidewalks and “traffic-calming” infrastructure?
COVID-19 brought the issue to the forefront with the advent of concrete barriers to enable sidewalk dining. While Soucy said he supported the COVID initiative as a way to help save restaurants financially, he now sees the idea getting out of hand.
He points to the city’s master plan, supported by Donchess, which calls for the possible extension of sidewalks into existing parking or traffic lanes, with two lanes of traffic, one going each way, on Main Street.
Soucy says he “knocked on every door” in the downtown area and asked every property owner who is not a restaurant owner what they thought of the current barriers, let alone the master plan.
“Eighteen businesses told me it was killing them. Three or four said they could end up closing. Three said they liked them, and one couldn’t care either way. Yet Mayor Donchess and his Imagine Nashua plan says they are getting good reviews from shop owners and citizens with reference to downtown barriers. He can’t see, hear or feel what his constituents want. It’s 85 percent or higher of people who do not want them.”
Donchess said the Master Plan is “guided by the citizens of Nashua,” and not by the mayor.
“It remains to be seen what’s going to happen,” he said. “The master plan, guided by the citizens of Nashua, recommended that some changes be made in that direction, but before taking a step like that we would have to take a lot more public input and decide what the community feels is best.”
According to Donchess, “There’s no question that outdoor dining has boosted the downtown economy. Post-COVID and even before, we don’t have the daytime office workers that we used to; no downtown does, so in order to maintain and build a stronger downtown economy you are really relying on restaurants.”
He points to surveys that suggest 80 percent of visitors to downtown Nashua came downtown for the restaurants or bars, “and those surveys were before the arts center opened.”
“Now that the (arts center) is there, if you combine that with restaurants, it’s way more than 90 percent of people who come downtown are doing restaurants, bars and the theater. If you want a downtown that’s alive; if you want to have young people live in your community, you’ve got to have an alive downtown.”
Affordable housing
After taxes, the lack of affordable housing ranks high on the list of local concerns. “If you really analyze this truly, the problem is government,” says Gallant. “It benefits them so much to have unaffordable housing. This is a cash cow for the government. They couldn’t ask for anything better. Until you get government controlled by the citizens and shrink it, everything is going to continue to rise by design.”
Soucy would like to see the city add at least 2,000 new apartment units in the years ahead. “We have to build,” he said, “and given the lack of land we have to build these three- or four-story complexes all over the place. This is the new Nashua. We are going to build apartments up, because when you have a limited amount of land, where else do you go.”
Toward that end, Donchess points to the “inclusionary” zoning ordinance Nashua passed, which requires affordable units and encourages multifamily housing that other communities discourage through “exclusionary” zoning.
The result is a building boom in the city with more than 1,000 units of new housing permitted in the past two years, with about a quarter designated as affordable (rent equals 30% of median income for Nashua).
Commuter rail
Donchess is a big supporter of extending commuter rail connections from Nashua to Lowell, Mass., and a hookup to the MBTA transportation system. The project has been a political football for 20 years, with no significant advance except that a feasibility study was almost complete, until the Executive Council recently shut off funding.
To Soucy and Gallant, such a project would just be another government boondoggle, with high costs and low ridership, subsidized by taxpayers.
“We are not urban enough to do that,” says Soucy, citing low potential ridership in studies and costs for constructing railway stations and upgrading hundreds of miles of track.
Donchess says he will continue to advocate for the project, which he sees as “a huge opportunity for the city.”
“It would add jobs, strengthen the economy, develop a lot of the tax base,” he said. “It would be a huge boost for Nashua. Right now, there is an unprecedented amount of money available for these rail projects, and without completion of the planning stage we are not eligible to get all that federal money. The Executive Council just turned their backs on a major opportunity for federal money that could greatly benefit the state and the city.”
These articles are being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.