Worth the study
C onnecticut and its towns and cities must continue exploring ways to provide services more efficiently. Doing more with less is likely to be the norm for several years to come, at least. The General Assembly faced a July 1 deadline, the start of the fiscal year, to approve a two-year state budget plan. It has yet to do so.
Municipalities face budget cuts as the legislature works to close a $3.4 billion spending gap — the hole left after the $1.6 billion saved by the labor concessions deal. It is not a question of whether but how much the state reduces municipal funding and where.
It is in the face of these realities that the public should welcome news that the neighboring towns of East Lyme and Old Lyme are exploring the potential of jointly utilizing a single police department.
East Lyme only recently began operating its own department, ending years of using a resident state trooper and a force of constables to provide policing. The legislature has been gradually increasing the cost to local communities of the resident trooper program, providing an incentive to find ways to self-police. A police chief, with 23 full-time officers and a part-time officer, make up the new department.
Old Lyme has a resident state trooper, six full-time officers and a part-time officer.
The discussions between Old Lyme First Selectwoman Bonnie Reemsnyder, a Democrat, and East Lyme First Selectman Mark Nickerson, a Republican, are preliminary. If the two elected leaders reach the point where the idea appears viable, they should form an ad hoc committee, with representatives from both towns, to explore the details and impediments to such an arrangement.
At first glance, it would seem a single department could well serve the two shoreline communities, with savings in administrative and associated costs.
The legislature, meanwhile, needs to do all it can to eliminate statutory barriers that prevent such new regional arrangements and instead provide incentives to develop them, which to some limited extent it has.
When examined more closely, it could well turn out that the savings are not significant or that the negatives outweigh the positives. But as Reemsnyder well put it in an interview with The Day, “we have a responsibility to see where collaboration could lead us.”