Pawtucket Mayor Don Grebien has proposed sharing certain municipal services with the city of Central Falls to cut costs and generate revenue for both cities. The city of Pawtucket, which has a deficit of $9 million in its current budget, would benefit from providing services to the smaller Central Falls, said Central Falls' appointed receiver Robert Flanders Jr. '71. Central Falls has been under state control since May 2010, and expects a $5 million budget shortfall next year.
Grebien submitted the proposal — called Pawtucket Central Services Inc. — to the state Department of Revenue. Under the terms of the proposal, Central Falls would pay to receive services from Pawtucket, such as zoning and coding enforcement and animal control. The two cities would share police and fire forces, Flanders said.
"It's the notion that if we can pay for services or share them with another municipality, we can potentially save money and reduce expenses," he said.
Regionalization of local services such as police and fire protection has become a common way for smaller local communities to cut the cost of service provision, wrote Nathaniel Baum-Snow, assistant professor of economics, in an e-mail to The Herald.
"This is not unique to Central Falls and Pawtucket. We are all scrambling to try and figure out what might be some ways to get out of this financial trouble," Flanders said.
Sharing services would begin on a low-risk level, such as library services. "We are already drawing up proposals for the ‘low-hanging fruit' … to see how some of these work without being as high stakes as would police and fire," said Doug Hadden, spokesperson for Grebien.
The sharing of police and fire departments would be complicated by collective bargaining agreements, which cover municipal employees through 2012, Hadden said.
Central Falls Police Chief Joseph Moran III was not familiar with the details of the proposal. "We haven't really sat down. It's all behind the scenes," he said.
Officials predict that Pawtucket and Central Falls will begin sharing other services — besides police and fire departments — in the near future. "It could happen within a matter of weeks," Flanders said.
Hadden and Flanders stressed that the standard of services would not be compromised by the proposal. "I don't expect any change to be felt by the residents, except for potential savings," Flanders said.
"In terms of police and fire, we cannot jeopardize the level of those services," Hadden said.
Weekly salaries for police and fire officials are significantly higher in Pawtucket than in Central Falls — police patrolmen in Pawtucket receive $882, as opposed to $658 in Central Falls, according to a Feb. 28 article in the Providence Journal. Grebien told the Journal that shared services would allow Pawtucket to see savings and that the shared forces would eliminate the need for hiring.
Flanders said he doubted Pawtucket would lay off any employees in the process, pointing to Pawtucket's self-insurance policy, which stipulates that the city has to pay two-thirds of compensation to any employee it lays off. The city would have to lay off three people to get one unit of savings, he said. "This would devastate social services when scaled."
"The greatest difficulty will likely lie in convincing the police and fire forces from the two communities that it is in their interest to integrate their ranks and make do with resulting smaller overall budgets," Baum-Snow wrote.
