Courant Talks Up Regionalism

I’ve griped a few times in the past about how inefficient Connecticut local government is, due to the state’s 169 towns duplicating functions. (See here and here.)  To put it bluntly, I wish the state had abolished town governments and kept the counties.

Over the weekend, the Courant ran a good editorial on the subject of regionalism which, while I don’t think it goes far enough, is a good start:

"Regionalism" is a rather bureaucratic and imprecise term for expanding the geographical base on which a particular government service is performed. It is a deceptively hard concept to get across, in part because it’s rarely clear what the optimal size of a region should be for the delivery of a particular service. This is reflected in the regional entities we do have. Despite the state’s almost sacred sense of localism, we have, according to a 2000 study by the state Advisory Committee on Intergovernmental Relations, about 1,000 intergovernmental ventures of various types and sizes. These range from two-town health districts to a eight-town sewer and water authority, and from a 39-town police mobile communication system to a waste disposal authority that serves 118 communities. These tend to be voluntary, single-function entities that are helpful without ceding local control.

State statues authorize regional efforts in more than three dozen areas, but most of these laws allow one function at a time — health districts, for example, which provide licensing, regulation, emergency planning and other public health services to member towns.

The question is whether we want to up the ante, to consolidate more services and strengthen the state’s metropolitan regions.

If folks keep thinking about the idea, both through the budget discussions of next year’s legislative session and on into town budget referendum season next spring, maybe part of my wish might be partially realized.