If the Katahdin area is going to grow, its communities must act together to create an independent nonprofit group that will break down barriers, improve local government communication and coordination, and create regional projects.

That was one of the recommendations made in a final report released by Advanced Management Catalysts Inc., a private consulting firm hired by Millinocket, East Millinocket, and Medway to help the towns explore ways to consolidate municipal and educational services.

Consolidation was considered – and ultimately failed – in several areas, Millinocket Town Manager Gene Conlogue said. One plan would have consolidated the Millinocket, East Millinocket and Medway police departments. Another would have created a joint transfer station for the three towns, plus Woodville. The third involved consolidating recreation departments for two of the three towns.

The plans failed for many reasons, said Michael Kelly, chairman of Advanced Management Catalysts. The biggest may be “the 100 years of distrust among the communities,” he said.

“There’s the economic distress that makes people fearful, suspicious, angry, and there’s a belief that they’ll lose their identity,” Kelly said of the communities. “Some of the issues in this area are going to take a generation to resolve.

“The good news is that there’s a core of people there who recognize that the city limits don’t define who they are or what they could become, and that’s a good thing because the area has tremendous potential,” he added.

The consolidation efforts may have failed, but others are ongoing, and the AMCI plan provides a good foundation upon which to build success, Conlogue said.

“The report is fine as far as it went,” Conlogue said.

“The cautions or caveats should be taken to heart by people in this area. We need to find ways to work together with communities in this area,” he said.

Community weekend conferences among area leaders and residents that were facilitated by AMCI over almost two years showed residents from different communities that they had common goals, such as the need to alleviate the area’s 27 percent unemployment rate, the report states.

“Essentially what they [conferences] did is proved to people that they really can work together and that when they do work together, they come up with some pretty wonderful ways of seeing things, of things they can do together, of ways to make progress,” Kelly said. “All of that is important.”

The towns could also save hundreds of thousands of dollars by combining redundant services, Kelly and Conlogue said. The conferences helped leaders draw a blueprint of how that could be done and gave them valuable lessons about how the towns work.

“We put together some plans that could have been implemented to save tax dollars,” Conlogue said. “It is disappointing that we didn’t get those results, but we did learn a great deal.”

Some regional economic agencies are already making headway in drawing more jobs, and more economic interest, to the region, Kelly said.