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Home > Blogs > Butler County News and Issues > Archives > 2009 > March > 28 > Entry
A friendly exchange
Reviews have been positive of a countywide summit Thursday evening where the entire power structure of Butler County came together to discuss ways to work together and share resources.
Not only did local leaders talk about collaboration without arguing over turf, many of them went afterwards to Ryan’s Tavern to watch the Pittsburgh-Xavier game.
Towards the end of the meeting, county Commission President Donald Dixon joked that Hamilton City Councilman Ed Shelton offered to buy the 100-plus attendees a round at the bar.
Shelton stood up and joked that the city was going to start bottling and selling its own water. “Hamilton Ohio has the best water in the United States,” he said, referring to a title recently won by the city.
Shouted Fairfield Mayor Ron D’Epifanio without missing a beat: “But it costs too much.”
Laughter ensued.
Here is the coverage of the summit Thursday night (Go here for the original story):
The days of political turf wars are over.
At least that’s the lofty goal after residents and government decision-makers from every jurisdiction of Butler County — more than 100 people in all — packed into a conference room at the Government Services Center in Hamilton Thursday, March 26, to find new ways to work together.
They broke into groups of a couple dozen each and made lists of areas where local governments could collaborate, ranking them in difficulty as easy, medium and hard.
Suggestions ranged from sharing emergency training to reducing the number of local governments, proposed by Middletown Economic Development Director Mike Robinette.
Then each person voted on one idea in each category they believed should be worked on.
The hands-down favorite was consolidated purchasing, which was ranked as easy. There’s savings to be realized, county and township officials said, if local governments went together on large bids and utilized economies of scale.
In the moderate column, merging county and area courts, electronic imaging work, police SWAT, information technology and human resources all received multiple votes.
Merging the administrative side of county and area courts would be easy, said Clerk of Courts Cindy Carpenter, because their funding comes from the same place and they do much the same thing.
The “hard” efforts to get multiple votes included public transportation and merging information technology.
What do you think of these ideas? Are they realistic? Worthwhile? Was there something else that should’ve been a finalist?
In the process of creating these lists, hints at future debate emerged. Rob Wile, owner of United Heartland Insurance, suggested merging all the fleet management and maintenance offices across different governments.
“A lot of this stuff is going to scare township government,” responded Todd Farler, Madison Twp. administrator. “It’s not so much that townships will be afraid of losing control, it’s a matter of losing their service our residents expect of us.”
County officials said they will assemble the list into a report in coming weeks and see if those who attended would be interested in forming task forces to accomplish some of the reforms.
It was a good first step, said county Commissioner Gregory Jolivette, who organized the summit to address governmental budget shortfalls.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Butler County
Comments
By Sam
March 29, 2009 12:53 PM | Link to this
Talk is cheap, wait until someone realizes they are losing control of one of their services. Which police chief agreed to let the sheriff provide a SWAT Team for them? If the SWAT Teams in the county are combined King Richard will demand to run it.
By Kim
March 30, 2009 11:22 AM | Link to this
Once the county takes over the Hamilton Water System then it won’t cost the county anything. Is that the plan? This is all about the county taking control of everything, its a power trip of Greg Jolivettee and his puppet master Don Dixon.
By Waterboy
March 31, 2009 11:59 AM | Link to this
They talk about consolidation of fire departments, which departments are they are doing away with?
By Luther
March 31, 2009 8:53 PM | Link to this
Maybe the county can ask the cities and townships to partner up with them to hire a travel agent. At their last meeting the commissioners approved over $7,000.00 in travel for county employees. Every meeting they spend thousands of dollars on travel, yet they claim they are broke. Can’t blame the employees, who wouldn’t want to get out of the county for awhile.