Strength in numbers
Municipalities share good fortune of pooled services
In the Turtle Creek Valley, six municipalities share three code enforcement officers that they’d be hard-pressed to afford on their own.
A dozen Allegheny County communities near the Monongahela River handle street sweeping collectively rather than incur the cost of buying and maintaining the equipment and performing the function unilaterally. Nineteen North Hills communities share a yard waste and leaf composting site in North Park.
And across 19 South Hills boroughs and townships, a professionally trained SWAT team made up of members of multiple police departments provides emergency response beyond the capability of any single suburb. That area’s volunteer fire companies have similarly collaborated to create a technical rescue team ready to respond anywhere in the South Hills.
Those are but a few examples of cooperation among officials of the county’s 130 municipalities — 40 of which have fewer than 2,000 residents — in seeking greater strength in numbers. Their residents and budgets stand to benefit from banding together in various ways, while stopping short of the kind of controversial full merger that jeopardizes a local population’s sense of identity.
Such collaborations are all the more meaningful since Allegheny County leaders outlined a legislative proposal last month to allow municipalities within the county to voluntarily “disincorporate” — meaning they could disband their governments and turn over traditional local services and finances to the county. County Executive Rich Fitzgerald and other advocates described it as a potential tool for local governments that may be struggling due to shrinking populations and tax bases.
No local municipal official has spoken publicly of wanting to dissolve operations, if the Legislature takes action to allow it. Instead, some say increased cooperation already taking place among them — and likely to grow — negates the need for drastic action such as shutting down their local functions.
“I believe in consolidation [of services], where there can be benefits for neighboring communities from coming together,” said Braddock council president Tina Doose, pointing to a shared public works program that already exists with Rankin. “If you have a population like something under 5,000, why wouldn’t you talk to a neighboring community about how you can work together?”
And that is precisely what most
of the county’s boroughs, townships and cities have done, primarily through seven geographically oriented Council of Government entities. They’re nonprofit umbrella groups through which more than a dozen municipalities, in each case, work on joint projects.
The COGs have small staffs guided by boards made up of elected officials from each of their municipalities. The local governments are charged nominal dues to help cover administrative costs, plus they pay fees for any actual services rendered — such as public works programs or strategic planning handled by the COG staff instead of a private contractor.
The most widespread example of cooperation is the purchasing alliance coordinated by the South Hills Area COG for all of the COGs. It solicits bids on behalf of all of the represented municipalities from vendors of road salt, asphalt, vehicles and more. The local governments then individually contract for purchases from the companies while benefiting from bulk prices lower than they could obtain on their own.
For purchase of some municipal vehicles, the savings can be as much as $5,000, noted Louis Gorski, South Hills COG executive director.
“The communities have a strong sense of identity in Allegheny County, but they realize by using something like the Council of Government they can cut a lot of the costs,” said Tom Benecki, executive director of the Allegheny Valley North COG. “It becomes too costly to do things individually.”
The COG staffs typically have more time than a borough manager or similar municipal official to track changes in state or federal programs and policies with widespread community impact.
The COG professionals then share that knowledge with all of their members, in the same way that they assist them by developing expertise in technical areas such as grant applications. A COG can take on coordination of a multi-municipality study in the way that a private consultant might, but with savings by charging only for its costs instead of expecting financial profit.
The Quaker Valley COG, which has 15 northwestern municipalities as members, is leading a project to improve safety and aesthetics along the Route 65 corridor that will benefit all of the area’s residents. The COG also administers a solid waste contract on behalf of multiple municipalities, as well as a regional recycling event for materials that can’t be included in normal trash recycling. A study is underway to determine what other opportunities exist for “shared civic engagement,” said Susan Hockenberry, the group’s executive director.
“We want to be entrepreneurial and get economies of scale and efficiencies while respecting local control,” Ms. Hockenberry said. “Our only limit is the limit of our communities’ desire to work together. If something doesn’t solve a mutual problem and doesn’t improve the quality of life here, it’s probably not going to get a lot of traction.”
The COGs, some of which date back nearly five decades to the passage of state legislation authorizing their multi-municipal functions, are not the catalyst for every example of regional cooperation.
In the Quaker Valley area, for instance, seven municipalities in proximity to Ohio Township recognize their level of crime is too low to warrant the cost of having their own police departments; they instead contract with Ohio Township police to serve them. The Northern Regional Police Department of Pine, Marshall, Richland and Bradford Woods is a joint policing effort agreed to by those four communities.
The cost of policing is so proportionally large in a local government budget — for both staffing and equipment — that it is a common discussion point for municipal sharing, including outright police mergers. The COG officials, who aren’t involved with policing, say such plans can have difficulty seeing completion due to community concerns about losing local control and complications such as varying pay levels between existing departments.
The newest example of widespread cooperation under a COG banner is the TriCOG Land Bank, headed by the Steel Rivers COG on behalf of it and the Turtle Creek COG, but open to other communities trying to address housing blight. Twenty-one municipalities and six school districts signed a joint agreement with Allegheny County and are engaging in joint decision-making to begin acquiring and upgrading properties this year, said An Lewis, Steel Rivers COG executive director.
While the land banking initiative is new, only recently permitted by state legislation, Ms. Lewis said, “It’s consistent with what we’ve always done, which is help our municipalities share and collaborate.”
“I believe in consolidation [of services], where there can be benefits for neighboring communities from coming together.” Tina Doose, Braddock council president