Forum explores need for greater regionalization
About 200 local officials attended a May 16 forum that examined the successes and challenges facing cities and towns as they seek to reduce costs and operate more efficiently through regional collaboration.
The one-day conference in Worcester was sponsored by the Municipal Leadership Academy, a joint initiative of the MMA and Northeastern University to foster leadership, scholarship and advanced training and education for local government leaders.
Speakers examined the success of entities that have been in place for decades, such as regional school districts and regional transit authorities, as well as inter-municipal relationships that have emerged more recently.
Elaine Davis, Barnstable County’s chief procurement officer, described how a deeds excise tax approved in 1988 has helped to fund regional services. The revenue, Davis said, has helped make possible initiatives including the Cape Light Compact, which has led to lower electricity rates through the group purchasing power of some 200,000 customers; a harbor-dredging program; and the collective purchasing of gasoline, diesel fuel and heating oil.
Linda Dunlavy, executive director of the Franklin Regional Council of Governments, spoke of the success of regional programs that provide towns with services including building inspections, health inspections and accounting.
Franklin County communities also have been able to save money, Dunlavy said, by creating a county-wide emergency communications system.
“Our system was archaic, and falling apart, and we couldn’t get replacement parts,” she said.
Dunlavy said the creation of a regional framework was comparatively easy in Franklin County, the most rural region of the state.
“We had the advantage that our towns are so small that they knew they couldn’t do it themselves,” she said.
David Begelfer, executive director of the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties, described the complex collaboration that took place in the late 1990s among local officials and private-sector representatives to deal with growth and development along the western arc of Interstate 495.
Geoffrey Wilkinson, a senior policy advisor in the Department of Public Health, was among the speakers to highlight obstacles to regional coordination.
Wilkinson, who said a regional response could be a necessity in the midst of a flu pandemic or other public health emergency, discussed efforts by his department to promote legislation that would make it easier to provide public health services on a regional basis.
He noted that many towns are too small to hire staff to provide services.
“Where you live matters very much in terms of what kind of public health services you can be expected to get,” he said.
Franklin Town Administrator Jeffrey Nutting said regional approaches that have been enacted in assorted areas of local government are laudable, but remain limited in scope.
“We’ve been working on the fringes, folks,” he said. “We haven’t been able to get to the core, where the big savings are.”
A failure to regionalize at a more basic level, he said, could have dire consequences over the long term.
“For the vast majority of cities and towns, I don’t believe that local government [as it currently operates] is sustainable,” Nutting said. “People are not going to vote every year to increase their taxes, and that’s what they’re being asked to do.”
Nutting noted that the potential obstacles to regionalization, including resistance from unions and from some local officials unwilling to reduce their own authority, are considerable. But he emphasized that it is important for local leaders to understand the need to regionalize not as a sign of failure but as a necessary response to fiscal realities.
“Wouldn’t it be better to have one library in two towns, rather than no libraries in two towns?” Nutting asked. “And why in the world do we have 106 [municipal] pension systems? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have one single organization to send our money to?
“If this conference accomplishes anything, it should be for all of us to walk away and say, ‘How am I going to create change?’”
Nutting and MMA Executive Director Geoff Beckwith both observed that the state will need to grant cities and towns greater authority in order for the full potential of regionalization to be achieved.
“We operate under a constitutional structure that is particularly difficult here in Massachusetts,” Beckwith said.
Written by MMA Associate Editor Mitch Evich
