State budget revenues won’t improve anytime soon, so towns and school districts will need to find ways to trim expenses without harming public services or children’s education.
That means municipalities must find efficiencies in how they operate, House Speaker Brendan Sharkey recently told attendees of Hartford Business Journal’s second annual Municipal Collaboration Summit.
“We are in a time when we have to think differently,” Sharkey told the group gathered March 20 at the Hartford Hilton.
By “think differently” Sharkey expressed the need for municipalities to collaborate and share services to reduce their operating costs. That was a major theme expressed throughout the summit, including by panelists like former Simsbury First Selectman Mary Glassman, who is now the manager of the Office for Regional Efficiencies at the Capitol Region Education Council (CREC), a nonprofit that offers school districts program, leadership, and other support services.
Glassman works with cities and towns to promote best practices and new models of delivering services, particularly in non-instructional areas like transportation, facilities management, food services and information technology.
Municipalities, for example, can use CREC’s cooperative purchasing programs to save money for things like office and computer supplies and big-ticket expenses like school furniture and athletic fields.
Cooperative purchasing saved participating districts at least $3 million cumulatively last year, according to summit panelist Donald Walsh, former CREC chief financial officer and now a CREC project manager.
Districts are saving about 10 to 20 percent in costs through the program, he said.
“Nobody thinks that cooperative purchasing makes sense 100 percent of the time,” Walsh said, encouraging attendees, though, to examine it. “… If you like it, try it and we think you’re going to find that very often, probably most often, you’re finding that it’s easier to get lower prices this way than the way you’ve been doing it. … We think this ought to be a tool in your tool bag.”
CREC also offers a construction division staffed with experts who can help school districts oversee projects of all sizes.
Summit panelist Christopher Cykley, project manager and safety coordinator for CREC’s construction division, estimated his group has overseen about $1 billion in school projects in recent memory.
The division can help in areas that include development and planning; construction management; project closeout; furniture, fixture and equipment coordination; move management; and operational services management and commissioning, Cykley said.
Some of those services caught the attention of seminar attendee Denise McNair, Berlin’s town manager.
Berlin is about halfway through a roughly $83 million renovation of its high school, she said.
While Berlin schools and the town already share a human resources director and some grounds-keeping services, they’re examining additional collaboration, McNair said.
On school transportation, Christine Ruman, assistant manager of CREC’s Office for Regional Efficiencies, said CREC provided more than $5 million in savings last year to districts and towns that worked with its transportation division, which offers tools like routing software and scheduling experts.
Asked whether schools had been fully availing themselves of CREC services, Ruman said most districts have worked with CREC in education-related areas.
“Our Office for Regional Efficiencies really just started and I think that it may not have been something that people were talking about or thinking about, but now that that’s the speaker’s agenda and it’s something that’s really being pushed … it’s on their minds,” she said. “… I think that’s really part of the issue why we’re just ramping up now.”
Glastonbury Town Manager Richard Johnson said the summit’s workshops helped verify Glastonbury is on the right track in its efforts to find efficiencies wherever possible.
The town, for example, has an aggressive purchasing department and manages capital projects for the board of education, coordinates its energy-efficiency projects and maintains school grounds.
The town must provide the highest level of service possible in the most cost-efficient way possible, he said.
“It’s the way you have to do business,” Johnson said.
