The city of Hartford and town of East Hartford will explore “centralization and consolidation” of some municipal services, local officials said Thursday.
Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam and East Hartford Mayor Connor Martin made the announcement at a press conference held above the Connecticut River at the midway point of the Founders Bridge linking the two municipalities.
The mayors said a newly created task force would spend the next six to eight months examining potential points of overlap for shared services, a not altogether usual arrangement in a state which lacks county governments and prides itself on local control over most facets of government.
“Nobody would build a state with three and a half million people and out of whole cloth create 169 different municipalities,” said Arulampalam. “We all know that the system has inefficiencies built into it.”
“Can we work to share services and create efficiency,” Arulampalam said, “so that we can provide better service for our residents and also save some money for our cities?”
Regional collaboration ‘rare’ in land of steady habits
Martin touched on the relative rarity of larger municipalities in Connecticut entertaining the idea of shared services.
“We predominantly see shared services in smaller communities around the state,” Martin said. “I think the reason for why we haven't seen it in larger communities is simply due to the large volume of work projects, as well as the volume of need in each community that pushes each of our governments to capacity, not leaving much capacity to share with others.”
“But we also acknowledge that maybe the effort simply hasn't been made, and that communities such as East Hartford and Hartford need to make the effort to see what's possible,” Martin said.
Olusegun “Shay” Ajayi, the city of Hartford’s chief operating officer, named procurement, human resources and information technology as initial areas in which the two municipalities may find redundancies that can be eliminated via collaborative management.
Asked whether or not the sharing of services could extend to such areas as policing and schools, Martin said “everything is on the table.”
“If we were to spend our time worrying about the political backlash to doing something like this, I think actually that's probably the reason for why this has never worked for larger communities,” Martin said.
Martin said he did not anticipate the need to amend the town or city charters in order to accommodate the sharing of services.
“If, down the road, we see that we need to, that’s a challenge that we’ll overcome when we get to that point,” Martin said.
Bringing labor, additional communities to the table
Martin said that service sharing “doesn't mean that we're going to be eliminating jobs or cutting positions.” He also acknowledged the need to involve organized labor in the decision-making process.
“Our union members and organizations have to be at the table, as they make up the majority of our workforce in both of our municipalities,” Martin said.
Melissa McCaw, the town of East Hartford’s chief administrative officer, said any service sharing implemented could come to include neighboring towns and cities, as well.
“We believe that through this effort that there will be surrounding towns that will be encouraged to join and lock arms,” McCaw said.
The task force’s subcommittees will be chaired by Arulampalam, Martin, Ajayi, and McCaw, as well as Capital Region Development Authority Chair David Robinson, Travelers Vice President and Head of Media Relations Courtney Nogas, and Riverfront Recapture President and CEO Mike Zaleski.
