A very interesting editorial in the Norwich Bulletin this morning calls for cooperation between towns in Eastern Connecticut. A relevant section:
There is tremendous duplication of services from municipality to municipality in Eastern Connecticut. The potential to reduce the sizes of local government and reduce the size of the tax bill are tremendous. But local leaders need to be willing to give up their little kingdoms. We would all have to set aside our Connecticut Yankee mindset and be willing to work as partners, not 169 separate and distinct entities.
In every instance where consolidation happens, it will be important to ensure execution. For consolidation to be successful all parties must have the opportunity to be a part of the process and yet recognize they must adhere to the will of the single authority. In many cases, that authority should be a commission made up of all the stakeholders, including taxpayers.
The idea originally was brought up by Keith Robbins, outgoing First Selectman of Bozrah. Unfortunately, there are few other leaders in Connecticut right now who are willing to, as the article says, give up those “little kingdoms.” But this is exactly what we need if we’re ever going to get serious about cutting taxes. Local leaders have to start looking beyond their borders.
One of the comments to the article suggested bringing back counties and allowing them to levy an income tax (presumably taking that function away from the state government?). Also an interesting idea.
Source
Editorial. “Our view: Town leaders, voters can trim bureaucratic fat.” Norwich Bulletin 26 August, 2007.
12 responses so far ↓
I’m not sure how it is in the rest of the state, but in Fairfield County, people seem to have very stereotypical views of people from neighboring towns. Just about everything seems to be centered on the municipality, with Greenwich’s beach policy probably the most publicized. It’s going to take a huge amount to change that attitude, not sure if it’s even possible.
Right now, Greenwich’s school population is declining. This has caused the First Selectman to call for a study to close one or two of the 9 elementary schools, and then to redistrict. That’s caused some consternation, and this is just within Greenwich. I just can’t image what type of consternation would ensure if Greenwich had to somehow coöperate with Stamford on something. (Greenwich only borders Stamford and NY municipalities).
Darien, Westport, Wilton and New Canaan folks would certainly not want their public school children to be mixed with Norwalk’s or Stamford’s; Fairfield would not want its students mixed with Bridgeport’s. Ridgefield and Redding would not want to be mixed with Danbury. And so on. Seriously, regional coöperation that involved sharing of school resources would have little to no support in many of the wealthier towns in Fairfield County.
As far as counties implementing income tax, either in addition to or instead of the state, I don’t think that would work. Too many people commute out of state, espeically from Fairfield County, and thus they’d have to pay no income tax to Fairfield County because they’d already be paying it to New York state.
Good point about income tax by county. I’m not sure what the commenter was getting at there–an additional levy, perhaps?
Regional cooperation may have to start small, with things like the Departments of Public Works, and move up to social services, police and fire before hitting schools. You’re right when you say that no matter what, richer towns are going to be dragged kicking and screaming into regionalism for schools.
But then I have to ask: how serious are they about wanting lower taxes?
But wealthier towns typically already have lower tax rates as their grand lists are much higher. So regionalism would likely raise their taxes.
Maybe in some places. But a lot of richer towns in Hartford and Tolland Counties are towns that twenty years ago were farms, cows and not much else. There’s no industry or commerce there to make much of a grand list–they have to rely on residents almost exclusively. I’m thinking of towns like Ellington, Canton, Tolland and Suffield, here. Right now they’re dealing with a population explosion and an increased need for services like schools, fire and police, and they’re having a lot of trouble paying for them.
I haven’t done the math, but it seems to me that being able to tap into regional funds for schools would enable towns to keep taxes relatively low and make better development choices.
There is just one problem with this regionalism idea — it doesn’t work.
Actually, it does work. How much more money would it cost towns now part of a regional school district to have their own high school(s) and educational bureaucracy? In those cases, regionalism works very well. It can work better if we make it bigger.
I know it’s very like us in CT to want to have local control over as much as possible, but if we want to make our schools better statewide and start cutting property taxes down, we need to consider banding together.
“Our taxes would be lower if it weren’t for all that wasteful bureaucracy!”
What you are demanding is to reduce the quality of services in exchange for a lower tax bill. That’s fine, but with the images of crumbling bridges and levees that don’t hold so recent in our national memory, you certainly can’t pretend you don’t know what the end result will be.
If lowering taxes — rather than improving our quality of life — is your first and last priority, why shouldn’t we just consider you to be a right-wing Grover Norquist acolyte?
…Who are you talking to, Matt? I don’t think anyone here made an argument for cutting services. The idea of regionalism is to combine services, not to eliminate them.
Didn’t they try that with trash back in the 1990’s? Why won’t this idea just die?
NERA — The “North-East Regional Recovery Authority or something grandiose like that.
As I recall all the towns were acting in their own best interests (naturally) and the group never accomplished much of anything. I think it finally died. It was useless.
I think Canterbury keep coming on and going off. Being a small town I don’t think they thought the fees for membership (or whatever the issue was) was worth it.
Schools are one thing that works regionally. That actually works fairly well or at least I don’t hear that much complaining vs. other things.
Towns are seeing their budgets going up because they are accepting more and more responsibilities when they should be getting back to basics. Liberals on the local level (just like their counterparts on the state and national scene) just don’t know how to say “no” when a spending idea comes along.
Here in Windham the Democrats are building a Ballroom of all things even though they don’t really have a purpose for it yet and also want to sink a few million into a Whitewater recreation boondoggle and all this when we are in a deficit of nearly one million dollars.
The challenge will be to keep the local accountability while gaining some economies of scale. In Bozrah if the town crew doesn’t plow your street, you can call Keith at home and he’ll get it solved. If that road happens to be a state road try calling DOT to get it plowed. My point is that while you lose some economies in purchasing and services you gain in having youe leaders being accessible and accountable. In the Hartford area trying calling MDC when you got some problem. It is a blooted burearcracy with little accountability. I think if you have towns with similar economic and population profiles it might be able to work. But the regional cooperative cannot be dominated by one community.
The large cities in this state are in general very inefficient. Do the surrounding towns really want Hartford’s policy of allowing all of their employees to retire after twenty years of service. A payroll clerk gets the same “hazardous duty” retirement plan as a firefighter or police officer.
Joey has it exactly right — you can’t halve the staff dedicated to any part of local government (the snowplow crew, or the town clerk’s office, or anything) without diminishing the services they provide to the public.
The notion that for any proposal to be “serious” it must incorporate tax cuts is obscene.
Regionalization is already working in Town purchasing. Although each town in SECCOG maintains its own purchasing function, they are able to take advantage of state contracts for high volume purchases for such mundane supplies as toilet paper, pens, pencils, etc. as well as some large ‘purchases’ such as asphalt for repaving a parking lot. The program is administered through the SECCOG and CONN Department of Services. This program has saved individual towns since, if they were negotiating on their own, the price would be higher. There is also some regionalization in purchasing electricity through the CT Conference of Municipalities. This compact got some bad press during the recent legislative session because some folks paid more for electricity in 2006. That has certainly not been the case in 2007 where there is a 20% difference in the cost of electricity for portions of the town that are in the CCM agreement compared to the parts of the municipality such as the BOE, that are taking part in another program through the State Department of Education. The point of this long post, is to point out that regionalization is already working in small areas, it just needs to be done in more high profile endeavors such as Emergency Management, and Public Works equipment as well as consumibles.
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