Using Regional Cooperation to Save Money and Improve Services

The challenges facing Newton are not ours alone— educational mandates, financial pressures, and changing demographics affect every city and town in Massachusetts and the nation. Learning from the experiences of others and collaborating toward broad solutions, are central to success in the twenty-first century.

The City of Newton currently duplicates work that is being done in other communities that could be easily be shared. By failing to take full advantage of regional cooperation, Newton is missing opportunities to control costs and to improve services. For example, we do not collaborate with our neighbors on purchasing, economic development, or open space management.

Summary of Proposed Solution

We need to foster a culture of collaboration with other area cities and towns, putting mutual cooperation and collaboration ahead of borders and political boundaries. Working together with other cities and towns, we will:

• Develop and enter into regional purchasing agreements;
• Reduce duplicative research efforts by sharing information;
• Coordinate open space and economic development efforts;
• Cross-contract services with other communities; and
• Learn from other communities’ innovations.

Discussion and Implementation Plan

Regional Purchasing Agreements

The City of Newton has many purchasing needs that are similar to those of our neighbors. By forming a purchasing consortium, we can create shared bid lists, combine purchases to achieve high-volume discounts, share information about the quality and reliability of vendors, and reduce administrative costs. By April 10, 2010, we will contact the leaders of other area communities to explore the possibility of forming a regional purchasing consortium.

Reducing Duplicative Research Costs

To the extent that Newton faces the same challenges as other communities, we may find ourselves doing the same types of research and planning. For example, we face similar challenge as our neighbors when it comes to integrating state mandates into the math curriculum or fitting bike paths onto our streets without sacrificing street trees. We should coordinate these research and planning efforts with other municipalities to pool our efforts, helping us to get better information at lower cost. By assigning a given project to one city or town and sharing the cost across a group of municipalities, revenue is realized by the community conducting the research and costs are reduced for other members of the group. By a similar token, work that is contracted out to a consultant can be shared if it is relevant to more than one community.

Coordinating Open Space and Economic Development Efforts

Regional economic development and open space planning can not only reduce costs, but also strengthen planning efforts. For example, a parasite that is destroying trees in one community will ignore political boundaries and spread to the trees in a neighboring city or town if not stopped. Similarly, regional economic cooperation can create corridors of economic vitality that cross municipal lines. Residents from one community often enjoy the parks and open space amenities in a neighboring city or town. Development decisions can also have traffic impacts in neighboring communities. It behooves us, for example, to take into account input from our neighbors in Brookline when considering development proposals near the border between our municipalities.

Cross-Contracting Services

When one city or town lacks the in-house workforce for a project, there is an option other than contracting with a private company. It is also possible to reach out to other area communities to find out if one has the capacity to take on the project. The use of cross-contracting of services between cities and towns can often prove to be the fastest, most cost-effective way of completing a project that is beyond the capacity of in-house employees to finish on schedule. It can also lead to long-term inter-municipal agreements where workers are shared and services are provided, lowering training costs and increasing reserve labor capacity. These agreements are also helpful for providing specialized services that are desired by multiple communities but not needed on a full-time basis. For example, several communities that use the same financial management software package could pool their resources to hire one tech-support expert to service them all.

Learning from Other Communities’ Innovations

by building strong relationships with other cities and towns and training our staff to keep abreast of innovations and best practices developed in other communities, we can foster a culture of innovation that eliminates barriers to change and accelerates a cycle of continuous improvement and creative thinking.