Collaboration among municipalities is a great notion and it gets trotted out along with transparency and recycling and high speed rail, among other good-government goo goos, whether the times are easy or disablingly bad.
In good times, it might turn out that Oak Park and River Forest wind up owning a fire truck together. How many times have we seen the “Quint” pointed to as a sterling example of collaboration?
As technology revolutionized communications equipment and three neighboring towns were looking at duplicative investments in 9-1-1 tech, it was a no-brainer, though no simple effort, for Oak Park, River Forest and Elmwood Park to share an emergency dispatch center.
More recently, it seems, every candidate for local office “thinks we should look at” consolidating the entire fire departments of multiple villages, though they allow it would “certainly take many years to study and decide.”
So we’ve had the impulse and executed genuine collaborations in a couple of instances. But until “the recession that never ends” hit, until it resonated with every top municipal official that villages are at the bottom of the trough and that the state and the feds are squeezing off the spigot, the absolute necessity of all sorts of government collaborations became clear.
Last week, Oak Park leaders announced that formal discussions would soon start among the staffs of Oak Park, River Forest, Forest Park and Elmwood Park. We want to see these discussions take root quickly and bring results. The old governance model where every village performs every function — HR, IT, bookkeeping, firefighting — is not sustainable. Communities can’t afford the taxes to support the employees, their benefits and their pensions just so they have a function in-house.
The model must be upended and it can’t take years of study. We need a determined model of innovation and a perpetual assessment of what services are essential. Collaboration needn’t be just between villages. Within Oak Park and River Forest, there is room for shared efforts among the village and parks and schools and libraries.
Let’s get to it.