Once more on shared services ...

Hope Russ wont mind us including his Guest perspective: When is it appropriate to share city services? included in the Daily Journal today:

With tongue planted firmly in cheek I will ask the question, how many city employees does it take to screw in a light bulb? According to some, it should take a lot less than it takes today. With 21 cities along the Peninsula it would seem logical to take one city's expertise and share it with another, especially if it saves time and money and creates better service levels for its residents, right? I wish it were that simple.

Being an elected official, I am in a position to observe that one of the biggest challenges in the shared services debate is perhaps, how elected officials approach the issue. After all, we are elected to develop policy for our respective cities. With any intergovernmental agreement, we are expected to ask lots of questions on behalf of our constituents and we will not move forward unless the answers to those questions are crystal clear. With any issue, merging city departments or sharing city services amongst them, there must be a clear and overwhelming advantage to the city we represent. To put the concept of sharing services into context, let's use a hypothetical analogy. Imagine if your entire neighborhood agreed to share one lawnmower. You might ask, who gets to maintain the mower? How much do we all have to chip in to maintain it? Who decides who gets to use it and when? What if the mower is being used too much by one neighbor and not much at all by another? What if the mower is never available to the guy who suggested sharing the mower in the first place? Is this arrangement really more convenient than if I had my own lawnmower? If we end the agreement, who gets to keep the lawnmower?

So you see, the overriding question in sharing a lawnmower or sharing services between cities is, Who's in control?? On the surface it may sound selfish, but it is an important pivotal question that is not easily answered. If cities could answer this question, an important leap forward could be made in an effort to share more services. Joint powers authorities are an attempt to answer this question. Some have been successful while others have not. To overcome the obstacles it is important to first have benchmarks in place to measure the success of the streamlining. Our state government might be one place to look for answers. The state of New York for example, has a financial incentive program that encourages local municipalities to share services. Performance standards need to be met to take advantage of the state's incentives. It seems that if shared services are the new wave, some cities might need a little extra push into the water.

The state may never be in a position to help with financial incentives to encourage merging or sharing of services. In the meantime, rather than rushing into merging one city's strong department with another city's weaker one, let's instead look for the opportunities and efficiencies and share where we can. Burlingame, the city I represent, has identified areas that were once duplicated and are now more efficient. The sharing of adult sports league coordination with Millbrae and San Mateo is one example. Let's contract out services where we can. Hillsborough pays a fee for library services to Burlingame because Hillsborough does not have its own public library. Burlingame provides maintenance for Hillsborough's light vehicles and provides maintenance for at least six other city's fire apparatus. Clearly efficiencies can be found. But each partnership needs to be judged on its own merits. Generalizing and saying that all shared services are a good idea is too simplistic a view. The good news is that cities are slowly identifying mutually beneficial efficiencies. Cities are slowly working on the mechanics of how they will perform successfully in the long term and cities are slowly becoming more comfortable with the entire concept of sharing services.

As one of our more enlightened councilmembers said, this sharing stuff will be done more and more in the future. The duplication among cities have to be addressed - lawnmover or not!

- Written by Fiona