Ray Gottwald's Blog

Time to Regionalize?

Some of you may have been following the CCTimes articles and letters regarding the regionalization of some of  our services in Barnstable County. I submitted the letter below and would love to hear your thoughts and ideas of  town services and functions that would be good prospects for regionalization.

 To the Editor:

 Great article in the paper today regarding regionalization.    I totally agree that more town health department functions could be picked up by the County's Dept. of Health and the Environment. First of all they already have a very effective infrastructure in place and secondly they already provide back-up services to the towns.  

 Also, one of the things that has been discussed on the Assembly are the individual town grants programs for Human Services. Most of the towns on the Cape have all volunteer Human Services Committee's with individual grant applications processes. There really isn't much coordination across town lines on which agency gets funding and are the particular agencies receiving funding from many other sources. I think it would be great if the County's Department of Human Services could generate one common grant proposal and see if resources are being allocated in the most effective manner.  

 Finally, I think its time the County Commissioners, Assembly of Delegates and Cape Cod Selectmen's and Councillor Association organize public hearings in each town to ascertain specific functions that make sense to regionalize and to generate public support for those changes.  

Sincerely,  

Ray Gottwald

Deputy Speaker, Assembly of Delegates