Bergen Community College Hosts Shared Services Forum

County Executive made shared services a big part of his , and one of the county's biggest recent projects, the Public Safety Operations Center is a shared services project.

But when hosted a forum on the subject Friday -- with panelists from New Jersey, Michigan and Pennylvania -- McNerney was invited to speak. Fresh off his loss to Kathleen Donovan, however, McNerney cancelled.

Shared services can range in scale. They range from handshake agreements to work together on projects or borrow equipment, to formal agreements to share entire departments, all to save money on things municipalities would have spent on individually.

John Rasimowicz, one of the panelists, summed it up:

"On an ongoing basis, two towns get together to help each other, or to help themselves, actually," he said.

Rasimowicz works in the Department of Community Affairs, where he helps administer the Sharing Available Resources Efficiently, or SHARE, program. SHARE awards grants for shared services projects.

Shared services have caught on in the past few years, as municipal budgets are continually crunched. Since SHARE's inception in 2004, it has awarded almost 200 grants to research or implement shared services agreements.

Still, it's not so easy making such agreements happen. There's often resistance when municipalities try to merge departments with other towns, especially from the people being merged, said Linda Murphy.

"There are department heads who, quite frankly, would like not to see themselves planned out of a job," she said.

Though the idea is en vogue now, the idea of governments sharing services goes back a ways. In 1977, the state passed the Interlocal Services Act, which first laid the groundwork for municipalities to contract with one another to share services.

Today many counties and municipalities share services. In Bergen County, several municipalities use the county's animal shelter, and before the borough privatized its animal control service, the Paramus Animal Shelter served both Paramus and Maywood.

Though Murphy said New Jersey still hasn't gone far enough to consolidate services—she's in favor of merging individual school districts into larger regional bodies—one of the out-of-towners on the panel, Marie Donigan, a State Representative from Michigan, said the Garden State was well ahead of the curve. Donigan talked about her efforts to jump start a fledgling shared services movement in her state.

She did, however, relate the story of how Davison Township and Davison, "doughnut" and a "doughnut hole" towns, respectively, chose to merge into a single municipality, a lesson New Jersey, with its 566 tightly packed towns, could learn from.