Northern Middlesex Eyes Regional 9-1-1 Service
By Lyle Moran, Lowell Sun
LOWELL, Ma. — With Greater Lowell cities and towns facing budget challenges because of steep declines in state aid in recent years, they have been forced to become more creative about how to achieve cost savings.
One solution Gov. Deval Patrick’s administration has aggressively promoted to help municipalities achieve budget efficiencies is regionalization, which is when communities devise joint arrangements to provide necessary services to their communities, rather than having each community provide the service itself. These agreements also can take the form of municipalities contracting with a regional organization to provide a particular service to multiple communities.
Municipalities achieve savings through regionalization because they typically end up paying less for a particular service than they would if they provided it on their own, and if they have a contract with a regional organization, they are often freed from health-care and pension obligations.
The Northern Middlesex Council of Governments, known as NMCOG, is the strongest advocate for a regional approach to delivering services typically provided by each local government.
The organization, which serves nine Greater Lowell cities and towns, has a contract with six communities to perform the duties of a sealer of weights and measures. The sealer inspects business devices, such as supermarket scales and gas pumps, to make sure they are properly calibrated.
NMCOG is also exploring ways to provide other direct services to municipalities in the coming years. The organization, which has a $1.2 million budget, will complete an analysis in the fall highlighting possible benefits of member communities turning to a regional 911-dispatch approach.
One suggested proposal to the communities will be a central-communications center where all police and fire calls in the region will be directed instead of facilities in each member community. NMCOG also expects to propose that small clusters of communities could team up to provide the service, such as Tewksbury, Billerica and Chelmsford or Lowell and Dracut, said NMCOG Executive Director Beverly Woods.
Showing communities that they would benefit financially from the arrangement and that they will, in some cases, receive higher-quality service is NMCOG’s greatest challenge because local governments in Massachusetts tend to be very parochial, Woods said. Some communities still have yet to combine their own police and fire-dispatch operations.
“I don’t think we are expecting all nine communities will jump on board and want to do this, but the technology is available and affordable for allowing it to happen,” Woods said.
Funding for the dispatch-center study came from an annual $155,000 technical-assistance fund from the state over the last several years to look at regionalization and smart growth among communities.
NMCOG is also examining the possibility of providing regional animal-control services, procurement services, tax-valuation services and a regional public-works district for its member communities. Woods said she and her staff have tried to find an example of a shared DPW district as a model, but they have yet to identify one.
Chelmsford Town Manager Paul Cohen said NMCOG has done a terrific job with the sealing of weights and measures work, so he will closely examine proposals they put forth to regionalize other services.
“We have a lot of full-time employees, but we are always looking for ways to do things more productively and professionally,” Cohen said.
A regional approach to animal control would not make sense for Billerica due to its large animal population, but regionalizing some other services might be financially beneficial, said Town Manager John Curran. However, Curran said he would be reluctant to look at any agreements that would involve having one or more NMCOG employees providing a service to Billerica and Lowell.
“If you are regionalizing with Lowell, the city is the big kid on the block,” he said. “Lowell will always have the greatest need of the resource. Regionalizing is done best with similar communities.”
Lowell City Manager Bernie Lynch admits the city is a “different animal” from its surrounding suburban communities, which makes some potential service-sharing agreements impractical, but he said the city already has successful regional agreements with its neighbors. Mutual-aid agreements with police and fire departments, joint-purchasing work and the sale of water to surrounding communities are three examples he cited.
Lynch is eager to see the completed regional-dispatch study because he believes the communications center could lead to savings for the city if upfront capital costs are not too lofty. The federal government’s desire to trim domestic spending will also force the city to more closely consider regional efficiencies, he said.
The city should approach regionalization possibilities on a case-by-case basis and only pursue the partnerships that will produce savings, said Lowell City Councilor Patrick Murphy, one of the Lowell representatives on the NMCOG Council.
Woods said she knows it will take hard work to convince reluctant communities of the benefits of regionalization, but she said NMCOG will continue to follow the Patrick administration’s urging that regional planning organizations move forward with studies of the possibilities.
“The Patrick administration has very much had an emphasis on promoting regionalization among communities as a way to offset local-aid cuts during tough fiscal times,” Woods said. “We are cognizant of the fact that this will take time.”
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