FARMINGTON – As Maine looks to tighten the purse strings, a concept called regionalization keeps emerging as a possible cure-all.

But, the newly-hyped concept is not a new one, said Kate Dufour of the Maine Municipal Association at a forum on the issue Friday morning at the University of Maine at Farmington.

In fact, it’s already working out well in pretty much every community in the state, she said.

Nevertheless, Dufour and other speakers agreed, there is always more room for entities to work together.

Dufour was joined by Jim Reir, of the Maine Department of Education; Rep. Janet Mills, D-Farmington, and Rick Batt, president of the Franklin Community Health Network, at a Western Maine Legislative Caucus that examined the concept of regionalization and its potential effects.

Around 40 or so attended the early morning forum.

While the governor has made regionalization the new buzz word, Dufour said that in the past, Mainers called it “mutual aid and common sense.”

Examples of regionalization already in place are towns sharing code enforcement officers, offering fellow fire departments mutual aid and the 170 towns that share an animal control officer with at least one other community, she noted.

Mills explained that the concept is, in part, the result of the budget crunch and the state looking for innovative ways to save money. It has also surfaced because communities are starting to realize that projects like a casino in Sanford or liquid natural gas terminal in Harpswell affect neighboring towns, said Mills, who sits on the Governor’s Joint Select Committee on Regionalization.

She cited police departments as a place where implementing regionalization may save big bucks. Fifty-nine towns in the state with populations under 5,000 people have their own police departments, she explained.

Some, like Rangeley or Bar Harbor, need those departments because of seasonal influxes due to tourism. Others might eliminate the local force and depend on county or state police for coverage.

The state’s education department is moving to be more supportive of regionalization, Reir said.

Pushing the point is a decline in enrollment, which is expected to slide 12.5 percent in the next 10 years, and plummet by as much as 25 percent in some counties.

But, he also admitted that Maine is a state of independent people and he has run into many who are “flat-against” talking to neighboring communities about working together. For that reason, groups need help facilitating discussions on regionalization.

As state and federal reimbursements get smaller, Maine health care providers are looking to save money and improve services by realigning and regionalization is showing potential, Batt said.

He proposed a three-tier approach in which services like air transport would cover the entire state but services like a specialty cardiac unit would just serve a region. Meanwhile, providers that would just serve local patients would be family doctors, for example.

While speakers agreed regionalization was a good plan, how to put it into action was not so clear-cut.

Dufour suggested that in order to get entities to collaborate on a regional level, it had to be voluntary and had to allow communities to be creative in finding ways to merge services that worked best for them.

“Remember, you’re dealing with human beings. We don’t like change and we don’t like being told what to do,” she said.

In addition to the host, University of Maine at Farmington, supporting organizations of the caucus included SAD 9, Western Maine Community Action, Franklin Community Health Network, Mission of the Eastward and the Western Mountains Alliance.

sdepoy@sunjournal.com

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