Expensive turf

Future students of public policy will find a valuable lesson in Maine’s long and fitful debate on regional emergency dispatching services: Opposition based upon the vague concept of local control eventually gives way to the very specific desire to save money. Students of physics will find here a case in which the force proved unstoppable, the object not as unmovable as once thought.

A significant step in this progression was the decision last week by the Penobscot County Budget Committee to roll the entire cost of the regional service into the county budget, thus eliminating user fees assessed only to subscribing communities as part of the funding mix. Though it passed by just one vote, the policy shift is clear – the 4-year-old Penobscot Regional Communication Center is an essential public-safety service that the entire region must support. Communities that continue to fund their own dispatching do so at their own additional expense.

This issue has been causing trouble throughout Maine for a solid decade. In a county after county, the proposal for regional dispatching of police, fire and ambulance has been the subject of a great many angry meetings. Yet in the end, often after years of angry meetings, the objections about the loss of local control give way to savings – from tens to hundreds of thousands of tax dollars – that consolidation can bring. The testimony offered by the Old Town representative at that budget committee meeting provided a glimpse of the future: Old Town residents are staunchly opposed to giving up their local dispatching; Old Town could save $200,000 by using the county system. With turf that expensive, the eventual winner is not hard to predict.

With the necessary and obvious caveats about quality of service, the saving tax dollars side should win. Maine has long been known as a high tax state, but it’s now becoming notorious. Making this state more livable for people and affordable for employers is everybody’s business, including municipal officials. Yet despite some very pointed reminders by Gov. King from the earliest days of his administration that towns cannot pin the blame for high taxes solely on Augusta, and that overlapping dispatching services were a particularly evident source of high municipal taxes, the point has been painfully slow to get through. It has been four years since a bipartisan group of legislators toured the state with a plan to offer some $37 million in revenue sharing as a reward to thrifty municipalities that participated in county-wide cost-cutting efforts, from consolidated dispatching, recycling, code enforcement and payroll services to aggregate buying

of office supplies, road sand, even electricity. That extremely good idea was beaten

to a pulp at those meetings by the local

control advocates and has not been heard from since.

The quality caveats are vitally important. Almost every county that has adopted regional dispatching has gone through times when the system has not worked well. The problems – malfunctioning alarms, misdirected emergency responders, high turnover among dispatchers – are not exclusive to county-run systems, they are problems that can be fixed. The high turnover rate in Penobscot County (long a problem in municipal dispatching nearly everywhere), will be fixed by wage and benefits packages sufficient to attract and retain good personnel, even if that means a town saves $150,000 instead of $200,000.

Of course, nearly the entire regional dispatching debate thus far occurred under utterly different circumstances than exist today. Now, the tussle between cost-efficiency and local control is overshadowed by the struggle against terrorism, the potential for unimaginable emergencies and the acute awareness of homeland security. Quick, professional and coordinated responses are required, which the regional approach is well suited to deliver.