Municipalities of Massachusetts, unite

By Dante Ramos Globe Columnist  February 04, 2016

MONROE

A town of 120 people can only handle so much on its own, especially now. 

Monroe, the second-least populous municipality in Massachusetts, lies along the Vermont border on the far western tip of Franklin County. When you arrive in town, via a winding and ear-poppingly steep road down the hills that cut Monroe off from neighboring Rowe, the first building you see is a decrepit paper mill that shut down 20 years ago after decades of decline.

The structure is in danger of collapse. The taxes on it have gone unpaid for years. In its efforts to deal with the issue, Monroe is getting help from a brownfields program run by the nonprofit Franklin Regional Council of Governments. When town officials have full-time jobs far afield, though, it’s difficult merely to convene everyone who needs to be involved in the decision.

“It’s harder and harder to run these small towns every each year, and yet they still do it,” says Linda Dunlavy, executive director of the regional council, which provides a range of services to 26 communities.

Monroe’s ability to keep operating is a testament to small-town pluck. But as state lawmakers contemplate how much aid to budget for local governments, and how much transparency to require of them, the struggles of smaller municipalities raise an awkward question: At what point is a town no longer viable on its own?

In Monroe, the local sewer infrastructure was built to serve a now-defunct mill, but it still needs repairs. “Parts are breaking. We can’t replace them,” says Marcella Stafford Gore, the town’s part-time administrative assistant, town clerk, and tax collector.

Significant upgrades are underway, thanks in part to federal help. But getting certain grants approved is still difficult: New pumping stations, for instance, benefit only a smattering of people — including some of the public officials approving the proposal. Demonstrating that such a project isn’t a form of self-dealing by the folks in charge takes extra time and paperwork.

“Everybody in this town has a conflict one way or another on everything,” Stafford Gore says.
Massachusetts has 351 municipalities, most of which date back 200 years or more. Before the advent of telephones or automobiles, people needed to have their local government within a short walk or horseback ride away. Outside of Boston, the population used to be distributedrather uniformly around the state.

In the last century, though, most of Eastern Massachusetts experienced explosive growth, even as former farm and mill towns farther west in the state barely grew. Monroe, like Hawley, Hardwick, and Adams, has fewer people now than in 1920.

In municipal government, as in the broader economy, the pressures of the modern era reward economies of scale. Proposition 2½ constrains the ability of towns to raise taxes. Spiraling employee health care costs have crowded out other expenses. Federal and state money comes with justifiable, but ever more elaborate, reporting requirements; electronic systems ease compliance but require upfront investment and ongoing maintenance.

One recent flashpoint is the state’s anemic public records law. The Massachusetts Municipal Association, which represents city and town governments, opposes certain proposed reforms as yet another unfunded mandate from the state. Having to meet tight deadlines for responding to records requests, and having to pay the legal fees of plaintiffs who successfully sue for records, would be onerous for some communities, the association argues.

This argument sounds fishy to reporters who encounter governments that eagerly put out flattering information but somehow can’t afford to locate other records. But let’s stipulate that running a town in 2016 involves pricier equipment, greater accountability to higher authorities and to the public, and more specialized expertise than in the past.

If a town is genuinely burdened by these demands, it shouldn’t exist — at least not in its current form.
The New York Times reported recently that smaller towns in Maine are disbanding, opting instead to join the Unorganized Territory where state and county agencies provide services at significantly lower expense. And it’s not just the tiniest towns that benefit from greater economies of scale: In Quebec, the provincial government has “amalgamated” municipalities up and down the population spectrum.


In Rhode Island, perennially troubled Central Falls might have disappeared from the map years ago had any neighboring community been willing to absorb it.
 That city’s plight hints at why communities should band together long before any one of them reaches the point of no return.

The last time any Massachusetts towns were abolished, it was a tragic episode. To the dismay of residents, the towns of Dana, Enfield, Greenwich, and Prescott were “discontinued” in 1938 to make way for the Quabbin Reservoir. Today, eliminating a town would likely require a vote of the public in the affected community, a cogent plan that local residents were united behind, and the passage of legislation on Beacon Hill.

Geoff Beckwith, head of the Massachusetts Municipal Association, thinks towns are rising to the challenges facing them. Many smaller ones have already joined regional school districts. They’ve forged joint purchasing agreements with their neighbors, and are using voluntary multi-town arrangements, including the Franklin Regional Council of Governments, to obtain inspectional, health, and other local services.

Dunlavy says towns in Franklin County that rely on volunteer fire departments are coordinating more closely on the issue. “If you had asked a decade ago,” she says, “I would have said all emergency response is off limits [to regionalization].”

While nobody — other than the occasional buttinsky newspaper writer in Boston — is calling for political union among towns at present, the budget pressures on smaller towns are likely to grow. As broadband service becomes a necessity, towns neglected by phone and cable utilities must figure out how to provide it, and the cost of doing so may strain their limited finances.

But over time, alternative models of municipal governance could emerge: Imagine a federation of towns in which individual boards of selectmen survive but function more like neighborhood advisory councils.

In Monroe, Stafford Gore wonders whether anyone will step forward to run the town in the future. She also worries about what would happen if the town fell under the control of faraway state bureaucrats. With good reason — ask Flint, Mich., how that’s worked out. 

Yet keeping government viable at the local level doesn’t mean all 351 of today’s municipalities must exist in perpetuity. Surely it’s better to join forces with the neighbors than become a ward of Beacon Hill.

 

 

Dante Ramos can be reached at dante.ramos@globe.com. Follow him on Facebook: facebook.com/danteramos or on Twitter: @danteramos.