By completing a first budget of rough cuts and tough choices, the Baldacci administration now has time to refine its work by identifying savings through efficiencies, the elimination of redundant or underused services and using the saved money for needed programs that were hurt in the budget. To find real savings, though, the governor will have to search beyond Augusta, and for that he will need the help of town and city governments.

The governor could not have gotten a budget through as quickly as he did had the economy not been so weak or his relationship with the Legislature so strong. The weak economy may be around for a while, but getting municipal leaders to help as much as state lawmakers did with the budget will not be as easy. They are, as a group, understandably suspicious of state government, which funds or does not fund programs for which local governments are otherwise responsible based on druidic divinations of the legislative committees. A certain lack of trust exists.

The governor can change this, first by listening closely to the concerns of local officials about their relationship with the state, then by framing what has been obvious for a generation – that countless human activities are conducted on a regional scale, but local government remains as local now as it did two centuries ago. Schools are an exception to this, and if state policy-makers want to acknowledge that finding efficiencies is possible and even desirable locally, they could point to the still imperfect system of school administrative districts as an example. There are more savings to be found there, certainly, but they represent a substantial difference over other municipal services.

Municipalities can point to dozens of examples of sharing services – code-enforcement officer or tax collector who covers more than one town – but there is no comprehensive attempt to regionalize even as residents from one town drive from a suburb to a city for work, shop in another city and get their health care in a third. Town borders are much less important to a peripatetic population but they too often remain guarded by local officials.

This is not only a problem in Maine but it may be felt here more than elsewhere. State policy-makers looking to see how other comparable states operate note that Idaho, West Virginia, South Dakota, North Dakota and Oregon are geographically larger with lower population densities than Maine but that on average they employ significantly fewer workers to carry out local services than does Maine – 350 full-time equivalents per 10,000 population vs. Maine’s 410. Those states emphasize government by small counties that keep people in touch with their elected officials but still take advantage of efficiencies.

Cooperating with local governments to find more efficient ways of delivering services can be pretty dull business – don’t expect a popular uprising over regional trash pickup – but the results can be savings of tens of millions of dollars statewide. Or, put another way, tens of millions of dollars of improved services for the same tax dollars currently being spent. It matters.

Gov. Baldacci correctly made these efficiencies part of his agenda. His challenge now is to persuade local officials to trust state government (and their neighbors) long enough to see what services could profitably be shared.