Towns And Cities Urged To Share | Will Yankee independence allow for cost-saving regionalization?
Photo/Courtesy
Lt. Gov. Tim Murray is an advocate for regionalization efforts.
Earlier this month Lt. Gov. Timothy Murray doled out $450,000 to cities and towns encouraging them to regionalize their school districts in an effort to get municipalities to share resources.
The impetus for the greater focus on regionalization is a decline in state funding to municipalities along with reduced local tax collections. And while local control has long been part of the culture for Massachusetts communities, such independence may be difficult to maintain under tight budget pressures.
Inevitability
To regionalization advocates like Murray, now is the perfect time for communities to explore sharing resources.
“It’s the wave of the future,” Murray said. “It’s not a question of if, but when.”
Regionalization has been a political buzzword for decades, but some local planners say while there has been lot of talk about sharing resources, there are few examples to point to.
“We recognize there have been a lot of studies about regionalization, now we actually need to get to doing it,” said Bruce Leish, executive director of the MetroWest Regional Collaborative, a division within the state’s Metropolitan Area Planning Commission that covers nine communities in MetroWest.
One of Leish’s goals since arriving at the organization last year has been to encourage municipal resource sharing. He said in the coming weeks he hopes to hire an employee to focus on that specific topic.
Legal Constraints
But getting any two entities in the public or private sector to agree on sharing resources or a joint venture is easier said than done.
Such agreements can require complex legal negotiations, said Michael Refolo, a partner at the Worcester law firm Mirick O’Connell and chair of the firm’s business group.
Companies engaged in a joint venture, for example, must come to agreements related to intellectual property that employees create.
If a worker comes up with a novel idea, perhaps even one that leads to a patent, there can be a debate about who owns that intellectual property. While there can be co-ownership provisions, some companies may want to exclusively manage work created by their employees.
In other situations, when companies are working together one company may improve or make advancements to intellectual property that their partnering company created. Those can be tricky legal situations too, in terms of who owns and manages that improved product and how potential revenues are split.
Many private firms find ways to work through these issues, even Fortune 500 businesses that may be competitors. In 2006, for example, Hopkinton-based EMC Corp. began a joint venture with Cisco Systems Inc. with support from VMWare Inc. and Intel Corp. to create Acadia, a new company based in Texas.
But what works for the private sector doesn’t always work for the public sector.
City or town officials don’t always have lawyers to negotiate such complex legal agreements and it can be left up to local boards and commissions. Public sector deals have their own sets of issues too, said State Rep. Jennifer Benson, D-Lunenburg. Benson previously served as chair of the School Committee in Lunenburg when officials there were in discussions to regionalize the Lunenburg schools with Ayer and Shirley. The agreement never came about, even after years of planning and discussions.
Benson said the agreement just didn’t make fiscal sense for Lunenburg. Now, Ayer and Shirley are continuing their regionalization plans and got the bulk of the money Murray recently released, totaling $300,000, to finalize the plans.
As part of the grant announcement, the Mendon-Upton School district and the town of Hopedale received $10,000 to study their own regionalization efforts.
Public-sector agreements between municipalities can be extremely contentious, and any deal must be approved not only by townspeople but labor unions in each community, Benson said.
“Realigning all of these contractors can require huge upfront costs,” she said.
Grants like what Murray supplied recently help, but she said while they can cover the costs of planning, possible increases in benefit packages for employees can be an expensive, long-term recurring cost.
Murray, who chaired a committee earlier this year exploring roadblocks to regionalization, said perception is the biggest hindrance to the idea.
“There’s a proud tradition in each city and town in the commonwealth of having an identity and local control,” he said. “Just because you play that neighbor in the Thanksgiving Day football game doesn’t mean that teaming up with them will be a threat to your identity or control of services.”
There have been some public-sector success stories. One classic example is in Franklin County, where 26 communities in Western Massachusetts team together to provide a host of municipal services across the area. There are numerous other regional school districts in the area, including between Northborough and Southborough. Natick and Sherborn are also in discussions now to share some inspectional services between the towns.
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments