NORWAY – Selectmen and town managers from Oxford, Norway and Paris are preparing to roll up their sleeves and tackle the touchy issue of regionalization.

The three boards will meet every two months from August through December to brainstorm about ways to give taxpayers more bang for their buck by sharing staff and equipment.

“The governor’s office keeps saying we’ve got to regionalize. We’re already doing a lot of that, but maybe there’s more we can do,” said Norway Selectman Robert Walker, the driving force behind the talks.

When he approached Oxford selectmen Chairman Floyd Thayer about the meetings, Thayer was enthusiastic, he said. So were Paris selectmen.

“Let’s face it. We are three towns separated by a traffic light,” Walker said. Various services are already shared through SAD 17, the Norway-Paris Solid Waste Corp., and mutual aid for fire calls and police emergencies, as well as during winter snow cleanup.

With tax-cap initiatives looming, the time may have come to take the concept of shared services a step further, he said.

Regionalization in the Oxford Hills doesn’t have to mean anything as drastic as merging the fire or police departments – a touchy subject for some, one that has been discussed and rejected in the past.

But Walker said regionalization could mean more sharing of equipment among the three towns. Some equipment, such as fire equipment, cannot be easily shared because a town’s insurance rating depends in part on what equipment is housed in that town.

Sharing snow plow trucks and street sweepers can also be problematic, because each town needs to use that equipment at the same time. But other equipment might be easier to share, he said.

“You never know until you sit down and search for areas where we can save,” Walker said.

In terms of staffing, it might make sense to hire a grant writer to work for all three towns, Walker said, speaking hypothetically. One town alone couldn’t justify such an expense, but three towns might.

Walker said the three towns might also find that it makes sense to share a police officer who could focus only on drug crime investigations for the three towns.

The day is coming “in the not-too-distant future” when it is necessary for the towns to staff professional fire departments, Walker said. When that day comes, shared staffing could result in considerable savings, he said.

“Each town would hire a skeleton crew of, say, five people, instead of hiring 15 people for each town,” he said.

The first of the joint meetings on regionalization will take place at 7 p.m. Aug. 10 in Norway Town Hall. Subsequent meetings will be held in October and December, after which officials hope a plan will evolve for further action.