Towns take steps to share DPW services

Mass Innovations, From The Beacon, September 2012

Hamilton, Wenham and their regional school district have begun sharing their grounds and maintenance equipment and staff, a step toward what could become the state’s first regional public works department.

The ability to draw on personnel and equipment from either town is enabling more thorough school grounds and maintenance work, at no additional cost, according to Hamilton Public Works Director John Tomasz.

The school district had been paying roughly $26,000 to outsource its grounds and maintenance work. That money now stays within the two towns, enabling the shared workforce of Hamilton’s and Wenham’s public works departments to complete projects more efficiently. The two towns also are able to complement each other’s equipment. Wenham, for example, has a 14-foot mower, almost three times the width of the largest such machine in Hamilton.

“This has been great in some of our big fields,” Tomasz said. “Whereas my guy would spend an hour and a half there, with Wenham’s tractor it’s done in 45 minutes or half an hour.”

The ability to marshal larger numbers of workers also has proved useful, particularly in cemeteries, where more of the work needs to be done by hand, Tomasz added.

The grounds and building maintenance work, which got underway this past spring, has yet to generate documented cost savings, according to Tomasz. But the in-house workforce is doing a more thorough job than did the contractors.

“If you talked to the principals at any of the schools, I think they’d all agree and say, ‘Yeah, it’s so much better than it was,’ around the schools themselves.”

Despite initial apprehension that reorganization could lead to staffing reductions, the grounds and maintenance employees have gradually bought into the program, according to Tomasz.

“I know that our guys were skeptical,” he said. “But I think they’ve realized the benefits of it.”

Pooling grounds and building maintenance resources was among a series of recommendations endorsed last year by the Hamilton-Wenham Capital Management Committee. A second step, the implementation of which began this summer, concerns more capital-intensive building and ground maintenance projects.

The Capital Management Committee report also proposes a “combined DPW concept [that] would be responsible for providing the full scope of Highway Department services to both communities through agreed-upon collaboration.”

In addition to the capital management committee and the regional school system, Hamilton and Wenham share a public library and a recreation department. Several years ago, they explored the possibility of merging police forces. Hamilton and Wenham also were the focus of a Division of Local Services study examining the extent to which the two towns could further integrate their operations.

For more information, contact John Tomasz at (978) 468-5580.