Deficit has towns eyeing consolidation

Talk about consolidating services among cities and town in Rhode Island is getting more serious this time around.
After almost a year of little progress, some municipal officials are stepping up efforts to find places where they can combine forces with other communities to save money, spurred on by the looming $360 million state-budget shortfall that’s been projected this fiscal year.
On Aquidneck Island, Newport, Portsmouth and Middletown have hired the nonprofit Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council (RIPEC) to study the possibility of merging school districts, or at least sharing school services.
Across Narragansett Bay, the towns of East Greenwich and North Kingstown have signed a memorandum of understanding that each is interested in consolidating services where feasible, and including the school departments in the mix.
In Warwick, Mayor Scott Avedisian isn’t waiting until after inauguration day in Cranston to talk to incoming Mayor Allan Fung about combining resources. They’ve already discussed possible areas such as senior services and animal shelters.
This all may have more than a ring of familiarity. Last year, Gov. Donald L. Carcieri prodded cities and towns to start collaborating to save money while state leaders wrestled with a $168 million deficit. Local aid was reduced by $12 million, but despite a lot of consolidation and regionalization talk, most of it went nowhere.
This year is different. The size of the projected state deficit is more than double that of last fiscal year, and Carcieri and top legislators have made it clear that aid to local cities and towns is in their cross hairs.
If sizable cuts do come, municipal leaders have few other places to turn, especially since they are prohibited by law from raising property taxes above 5 percent.
Investigations into combining resources have begun in earnest, well ahead of the unveiling of the governor’s supplemental budget proposal next month when the extent of the funding cuts will become clearer.
In an effort to help communities with the process, the Rhode Island League of Cities and Towns is looking for examples of consolidations and regionalization in other states that can serve as case studies to be presented at the organization’s annual convention in February.
Some – like Daniel Beardsley, the league’s executive director – while expressing hopefulness, remain skeptical.
“Change, as everyone knows, takes place very slowly,” Beardsley said recently. “Has the amount of discourse increased because of the state’s budget situation? Absolutely. What will the end result be? We’re not sure. …
“[Taxpayers] like to talk the talk, but it’s difficult to walk the walk when it’s their household, their garbage-collection frequency [or] their children’s public education that are impacted,” he said.
Rep. Nicholas Gorham (R-Coventry) ran headlong into that resistance to change in the previous legislative session.
That’s when Gorham submitted legislation to merge five western Rhode Island communities and part of Coventry into one town called Westconnaug. The idea failed to gain any support.
Then the proposal became campaign fodder for his opponent, and Gorham insists he lost his re-election effort last month because of it.
While he said last week that the Westconnaug proposal was primarily intended to stir discussion about consolidating and saving taxpayer money, Gorham acknowledged he underestimated people’s attachment to their community’s local identity.
In hindsight, he said, his proposal should have retained the town names, the town halls and the local duties such as zoning enforcement. Instead, the measure could have been to combine all the “big-ticket items” like police, public works and schools in a county-style form of government. “There’s absolutely no reason why they can’t be consolidated,” Gorham said.
He predicted that something similar will eventually take shape in Rhode Island.
In the meantime, officials such as East Greenwich Town Manager William Sequino Jr. have perhaps learned a lesson from Gorham’s experience and are more aware that perception can be crucial in getting people to buy into cooperating.
“We’re not really talking ‘consolidation’ anymore; what we say is ‘shared services,’” Sequino explained recently. “It’s much softer, and there’s no winner and no loser in that.”
Sequino said East Greenwich and North Kingstown have already worked out an agreement in which both communities can “piggyback” on each other’s bids, such as for vehicles and office supplies.
That combining of buying power is nothing new. The League of Cities and Towns oversees the Rhode Island Energy Aggregation Program that buys electricity for 36 cities and towns at discount prices. The program has saved communities more than $24 million since 1999, the league said.
A group of 12 Rhode Island communities have formed the Coalition of Communities to Improve Rhode Island in part to pool public employees to reduce health insurance costs. Cumberland Mayor Daniel McKee said such a move has saved his town roughly $300,000 in fees from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Rhode Island.
In East Greenwich and North Kingstown, they’re trying to take it a step further, although officials acknowledged that recent local elections had slowed the process.
Sequino said the planned committee may look to identify duplicated services to reduce overhead, such as in the area of information technology or school transportation. In East Greenwich, as well as in a few other local communities, the school department financial duties have already been folded into the town’s finance department to save money.
On Aquidneck Island, officials from Newport, Middletown and Portsmouth had already formed a panel to examine the communities’ budget woes. Now the Aquidneck Island Advisory Group has commissioned RIPEC to analyze the implications for regionalizing the three districts, or collaborating in “core functions.”
The results of the report are due in February.
“We definitely have to rethink the way state and local governments operate,” said Susanne Greschner, RIPEC director of policy and research. “I think we’re in different times this year than we were last year, so it will be even more important to look at it again.”
But it’s clear that efforts that are under way are likely not moving fast enough to create any savings before the end of the fiscal year.
In February, about 10 northern Rhode Island communities found they were agreeable to combining their public-safety dispatch services.
Ten months later, little has changed. But Mayor McKee says consolidation of those services – and more – will happen. They are waiting, in part, for a new radio system to be installed in Cumberland
“There are some things, logistically, that will take time to happen,” McKee said. •

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