Counties and towns

More than 200 officials from Maine’s 16 counties gathered last weekend for their annual conference. At the top of the agenda was the question of how county government can fulfill its promise to be an effective regional provider of cost-effective, consolidated services.

It’s hard to remember a time when this wasn’t at the top of the agenda.

County officials should be commended for their efforts in this direction — there has been some valuable progress made in such areas as emergency dispatching and waste disposal. Gov. King has made the good point early and often that waste and duplication in government isn’t just an Augusta phenomenon — it runs amok at the local level. The Legislature has passed the statutes needed to make intergovernmental cooperation feasible and attractive. Just last year, the State Planning Office held a series of public hearings on an excellent plan to reward municipal/county cooperation with $38 million in increased revenue-sharing payments, and got shredded by the local-control crowd at every stop.

Despite recent reductions at the state level in sales, income and property taxes, the tax burden in this state remains one of the highest in the nation. Although low wages are the primary culprit, Maine cannot hope to improve the income side of the tax-burden equation until the outlay side becomes more attractive to new employers.

The consolidation of services — equipment, supplies, personnel — at the local level is long overdue; the deregulation of electric power offers a new money-saving opportunity for those regions willing to join together for aggregate purchases. Yet, despite years of talk about change, too many towns, cities, school districts and counties continue to operate as individual fiefdoms. It is especially discouraging that the greatest resistance to consolidation is found in those regions suffering economic decline, the very regions with the most to gain.

Meanwhile, the annual cost of local government has grown to exceed $1.5 billion.

The Legislature, the governor and the State Planning office have tried preaching, appeals to reason and cash incentives with precious little result. It’s time now for a region-by-region, service-by-service accounting of the cost of redundancy and the potential savings consolidation could bring, the kind of thing the General Accounting Office and watchdog groups such as Citizens Against Government Waste do at the federal level. A little grassroots outrage wouldn’t hurt either.