The changing face of regional government

The article in last week’s Beacon should come as no surprise to anyone who follows how government works these days. Eight Berkshire County school districts, with the guidance of the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, are jointly applying for a $299,000 Massachusetts Department of Revenue Community Innovation Challenge Grant to help the school districts work on curriculum issues.

This kind of regional cooperation is not new, but represents a continuing trend by Massachusetts governmental entities to try various strategies to achieve savings and efficiencies by working together.

In colonial times, Massachusetts used to have a “traditional” county government system where, in addition to the cities and towns and state government, there were 14 counties providing regional government services in their respective areas. Typical county services included sheriffs and jails, courts, registries of deeds and road surveyors.

By the 1920s, groups of towns began to form smaller districts for special purposes. One of the earliest was the Tri-Town Health Department, originally formed to inspect area farms to ensure good quality milk products for area residents. Now, the department, consisting of Lee, Lenox and Stockbridge, provides a wide range of services including food service inspections, septic system training and smoking cessation programs.

Similar early districts were the Barnstable County Department of Health and Environment (1926) and the Nashoba Associated Boards of Health (1931). Other districts followed – for roads, water, fire and recreation – but especially regional school districts, until there were hundreds of regional districts statewide serving a wide variety of purposes.

County governments eliminated

But as these special districts grew, the need for the additional layer of county government diminished and, following some counties’ financial problems and other counties’ corruption problems, the state legislature stepped in and abolished nine of the counties in the late 1990s.

The county courts had already been absorbed by the state, as had the sheriff departments. So, by the time the commonwealth abolished those county governments, they were already becoming relics, with elected county officials fighting to retain their authority in the face of an unyielding state government intent on eliminating the sometimes ineffective and expensive services the counties were providing.

Five counties – Bristol, Dukes, Nantucket, Norfolk and Plymouth – escaped the state’s chopping block and continue to offer selective services under the traditional system of three elected county commissioners. Three others – Barnstable, Franklin and Hampshire counties – formed councils of government (COGs) and now offer an assortment of services through a system overseen by officials elected from the cities and towns in the former county.

Berkshire County government was one of the nine counties eliminated, but in a referendum shortly after abolishment, county residents refused to form a COG, although some county-wide entities representing all or most of the county’s cities and towns independent of county government were not affected by the state’s actions or the referendum.

These include regional planning, regional transit, retirement and group insurance systems. They continue to provide needed services to the county’s cities and towns.

Other county-wide services previously provided by Berkshire County government were re-established through mutual agreement by the municipalities. One such example was the regional group purchasing program, formerly under the county commissioners.

That was reconstituted through the informal group of Berkshire town managers and administrators shortly after the county went out of business. This program oversees the purchase of a variety of services and goods for county municipalities, including roadway line painting, guardrails, culverts, asphalt, deicing products and heating oil.

But in still one more attempt to refine regional service delivery to a scale and at a price that makes sense, this group itself may dissolve when its current staff retires. The group could become part of an adjacent county’s purchasing program (the Franklin Regional Council of Governments is interested in Berkshire County’s business), or the individual Berkshire municipalities may take on selected procurements on behalf of the other county communities, with the promise of higher efficiency and lower overhead costs.

Some Berkshire towns are already pursuing regional purchasing for more narrow purposes. One consortium is seeking aggregated electrical services for its residents and another group will soon go live with a new building permit software system jointly purchased with the administrative assistance of the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission.

Massachusetts state government itself has recognized the importance of this kind of cooperation and now routinely hosts annual regionalization conferences, where successful cooperative efforts among municipalities are showcased and guidance on how to form these groups is provided.

It wasn’t so long ago there were three layers of government in Massachusetts – the state, the counties and the municipalities. But those days are gone, as the state’s citizens and officials recognize government must change with the times. What worked in the colonial era doesn’t necessarily work now.

Posted by Bruce Garlow on November 29, 2012. Filed under Berkshire Beacon Hill Spotlight,Columns,Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry