Readers Cautious on Shared Services Concept
We have and it hasn’t worked ie: the agreement with mp over gas, Central dispatch, the tub grinder with glen rock. the failed attempt to split a ladder truck with glen rock some years ago. The Long Island experience was the merger of small town pd’s into 1 big county force. Costs sky rocketed response time slowed drastically and alot of local municipalities ended up paying way higher county taxes. ( I believe they were deemed public safety tax) The Nassau county, and Suffolk county cops are the highest paid in the nation.
“We have (tried shared services) and it hasn’t worked ie: the agreement with mp over gas, Central dispatch, the tub grinder with glen rock. the failed attempt to split a ladder truck with glen rock some years ago…”
Are you kidding?? Sharing a tub grinder or ladder truck??? These are not example of shared services that generate any meaningful savings. These are agreements of convenience.
I don’t know all the details of Central Dispatch. But, from what I understand, this was poorly conceived and has been poorly run from the start. This entity needs to be audited, at least informally, by the Village (not people connected to Central Dispatch) to understand why Ridgewood contributes $600K+ of the $1.6MM annual cost to this service for 13 towns (almost 5 times the theoretical average share of the expenses) and why a handful of employees are being paid $1MM a year and god knows what else in benefits to operate this service. I think Paramus dispatch offered to run this service for Ridgewood a few years ago for less than $100K. If so, Ridgewood’s Central Dispatch seems like a good example of poor oversight and management, not a “model of shared services” as described by Gabbert.