Jack Spillane has a column in today's Standard Times about the conference on Wednesday where local municipalities met to explore ways to regionalize services. He correctly points out that the barriers are high. Towns don't want to give up local control or are worried that their particular viewpoint will be lost when services are delivered regionally.
There were some interesting revelations on the regional front at the meeting. For instance, Rochester and Mattapoisett share a Town Accountant. Achusnet and Fairhaven share a variety of services including animal control. These small co-operative efforts are a beginning and I think that even greater savings could be found by expanding the scope.
Why not have a county or region wide animal control district? Could coastal towns save money and get more service ...
... by having a regional solution to Natural Resources (Shellfish wardens)? Perhaps a savvy entrepreneur would be willing to form a company to provide health inspections to local Boards of Health or building inspectors to local building departments. My idea on that concept is a fee for service arrangement by which aggregating the inspection workload from several communities, then makes it profitable for companies to bid on providing the service. It is quite possible the towns could get better and more timely inspections and reduce costs as well.
There are also ways to reduce costs within towns. Barnstable town and school district business offices are combined as well as their human resource functions. Dartmouth could save thousands of dollars by making this move and reduce the traditional distrust between the town and school financial departments by increased transparency to both sides.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Jack Spillane on regional services
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8 comments:
Freetown and Lakeville also share animal control officers too.
talk, talk, talk...
I watched the summit and was impressed with Canessa. He said that Maryland has 32 school districts!
The state will eventually tell us we have to change things!
We cannot continue doing business as usual.
You call that animal control ! They just do dogs and the services are very basic to say the least. Look at the cow incident last week . Should have never happened. I think Dartmouth needs to look at what they will be losing before taken certain steps with certain department. And why cann't the shellfish warden be part of the Habour master department Don't they have like 7 assistant Harbour masters? Seems pretty silly to cut his hours and have 7 part timers. Don't ya think
Bill,
Why were our tax bills mailed to a Boston address?
The town, Mr. Iacaponi and Ms. Piva in particular, investigated the suggestion of the Privatization Study Group, which included Mr Gracie, about potential cost savings in using a lockbox service to process payments. The result is that payments are made to a service which does all the paperwork and then deposits the funds in the town's account all without any town employee needed
What are we paying the lockbox service provider?
I understand that this is to free up time for the staff to do other tasks during their workday, but how is resultant increased staff productivity measured time- and task-wise, and what/where is the savings?
How soon will some of TH and the Town's consolidation of departments occur? Is there a projected timeframe?
The lockbox service is provided at no cost by the bank. They do it to get our business
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