When a car crashes, a house is burning, or a wayward bovine blocks a roadway, those seeking help through the local dispatch center care little who pays the person answering the phone.

Yet who funds this service, and for how much, is a ceaseless source of debate between cities and towns, as large communities feel they subsidize rural dispatching, while rural communities counter with claims of subsidization for the cities’ proportionally greater use of the county jail.

From a policy standpoint, this is irresistible force versus immovable object. Teams from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are almost required for the statistical analyses to prove either thesis, which usually crumbles efforts to equalize funding.

Androscoggin County is at this point again. Talks about consolidating dispatch services into one center, servicing the entire county, are sidetracked amid cost concerns of smaller communities. A two-dispatch center plan – one rural, one urban – has been broached.

While this idea has logic, it won’t save taxpayer money. All it does is skirt the inherent problem in funding county dispatch and law enforcement – municipalities providing those services have no remedy for paying for the same from the county.

Without agreement by smaller towns to accept additional financial burden – a deal even P.T. Barnum couldn’t sell – cities with police departments and dispatch centers are stuck paying extra. And there are few greater taxpayer burdens than duplication of services.

Yet if corrections are removed from county purview, as proposed by the Baldacci administration, momentum for reshaping counties should continue through law enforcement and dispatch, as it appears the only solution for equitable funding is their absorption into other forms of government.

Or in other words, if the middleman is double-dealing, cut them out.

The governor’s plan for jails is far from a done deal, however. Even his own brother, Commissioner Peter Baldacci of Penobscot County, is against it, leading a vanguard of county officials from across the width and breadth of Maine. A negative reaction from this arena was expected.

Taxpayers, however, should be piqued at the possibility. Though some county officials decry jail consolidation as “smoke and mirrors,” as the Ellsworth American quoted Hancock County Sheriff Bill Clark, it has more potential for savings than continued management under the county system.

And so does dispatch and law enforcement, given the historic inability to agree on how to fairly fund them.