Who is a member?
Our members are the local governments of Massachusetts and their elected and appointed leadership.
During four legislative hearings this month, local officials highlighted their ongoing commitment to cross-border collaboration, but urged lawmakers to remove statutory obstacles and to provide incentives and technical assistance for regional initiatives.
“We need to remove the barriers,” Marshfield Town Administrator Rocco Longo told the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Municipalities and Regional Government at a hearing on May 18 at the State House.
Mayors William Scanlon of Beverly and Kim Driscoll of Salem, along with Swampscott Town Administrator Andrew Maylor and Ipswich Town Manager Robert Markel, told legislators that North Shore communities are engaged in a number of regional collaborations and are pursuing more. Scanlon spoke of a regional public safety dispatch center that will open late next year to serve a dozen communities.
“In these very difficult times, with local aid being cut so drastically, regionalization really rises to the top as something that we’ve got to pursue,” said Scanlon, the president of the MMA.
“We really need to look at regionalization,” Driscoll added, “as a way to deliver the services that residents expect while also realizing the cost savings that taxpayers demand.”
Not every regional initiative will provide immediate and substantial savings, Maylor said, but they almost always improve the quality and efficiency of services, and generally result in savings over the long term.
Maylor pointed out, however, that regional initiatives often face stiff resistance from public employee unions. Markel added that “350 years of fierce independence” also can get in the way.
All the local officials at the State House hearing asked the state to provide incentives and assistance for regionalization efforts.
The series of hearings followed the April 30 release of a report by the 19-member Regionalization Advisory Commission, which was created by the Legislature last summer to study all aspects of regionalization in Massachusetts, focusing on opportunities, benefits and challenges.
The benefits, according to the report, include cost savings, better access to professionalized and specialty services, and an improved ability to meet mandated responsibilities.
But the barriers are significant, including human resources issues (reconciling collective bargaining agreements, benefit packages, seniority, and civil service status between communities that want to share services), the cost of conducting feasibility studies to determine the potential benefits of a regional program, and limited financial resources to cover up-front costs associated with a new collaborative effort.
At the Boston hearing, Marc Draisen, executive director of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, said, “There are dozens of ways in which the General Laws – probably unintentionally – make it difficult for cities and towns that want to do some form of collaboration to actually do it. … If I were to ask you for one thing … it would be to look seriously at all the suggestions in the report to modernize the General Laws and eliminate impediments [to collaboration].”
As one example, Draisen cited Chapter 115, which restricts veterans’ services districts to include no more than one city government and requires that the participating municipalities be contiguous.
The Regionalization Advisory Commission report calls for the state to fund regional pilot programs and to develop incentives and funding programs for a range of activities in support of regionalization, including facilitation and technical assistance for planning, implementation, host agency capacity-building, and transition and start-up costs.
“Only a small portion of attempts to form cooperative relationships among municipal governments make it to the intermunicipal agreement stage,” the report states. “Labor issues, determining [each] municipality’s cost share, and other similar issues have a tendency to upset such efforts. Municipalities that hope to form either a mutual aid agreement or formal contract need objective, third-party facilitators to ensure that each municipal corporation is getting a fair deal in the arrangement.”
The report recommends that the state conduct a study of municipal governance issues that present a challenge for collaboration. The state should also look into human resources matters relevant to regionalization and develop a list of recommendations, including best practices and ways to address the challenges.
The report also makes the following recommendations:
• Fund pilot programs and use the lessons learned to develop successful initiatives
• Hold a statewide regionalization conference each year
• Replicate existing successful programs
• Centralize regionalization resources, such as sample agreements and best practices, on a single website
• Leverage state grant programs to encourage collaboration
• Identify and develop outside funding streams
The report focuses on the following local government service areas: education, elder services, municipal finance, energy, housing and economic development, information technology, libraries, public health, public safety, public works, transportation and veterans’ services.
The report discusses a range of partnership models: informal “handshake” arrangements, multiple municipalities partnering through more formal intermunicipal agreements with one city or town assuming a lead role, municipal and school district partnerships, “uploading” of local services to another level of government, full-scale regionalization of a local service (such as K-12 education), and state-assisted establishment of programs available to all municipalities through the state procurement system.
Existing regional programs include special districts (e.g., the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority), 13 regional planning agencies, three councils of government, a number of county-based programs, and a range of collective purchasing, municipal accounting, regional health and cooperative inspection programs. The report highlights a number of successful programs provided by the Franklin Regional Council of Governments, particularly its accounting program.
“As the costs of government services soar faster than available revenues, local governments may struggle to provide essential services in their city or town,” the report states. “Engaging in collaborative activities can prove to be beneficial for cities and towns as they confront the challenges of maintaining critical services and managing limited resources. Regionalization offers a solution for how cities and towns can not only achieve economies of scale but also deliver local services more effectively and efficiently.”
The Regionalization Advisory Commission found that several states have made funding available to assist municipalities in planning regional collaborations and, in many instances, to implement the programs. Some states have also provided professional assistance to help municipalities deal with technical difficulties.
The report highlights regional initiatives in other states, such as New York’s Got Efficiency Program. The program’s strength is its ability to classify and track grant projects by municipal functions, as well as a consistent method for measuring savings. The program goes beyond technical assistance grants and includes full-time staff to help manage the contracts, projects and municipal outreach.
Eight current or former local officials served on the Regionalization Advisory Commission, including Franklin Town Administrator Jeff Nutting, the immediate past president of the MMA; Melrose Mayor Robert Dolan, president of the Massachusetts Mayors’ Association; and Lancaster Town Administrator Orlando Pacheco. The commission also included agency representatives, legislators and regional planners.
The legislative hearings were held in Greenfield, Barnstable, Boston and Ayer.
• Download the Regionalization Advisory Commission report (603K PDF)