43
Official discusses sharing services
By Ed Runyan
HOWLAND
He didn’t say so, but it seems likely that one of the things Dr. Thomas Pascarella enjoys most as director of administration for the city of Tallmadge is when a once-reluctant city employee admits that Pascarella had a good idea.
“I’m probably not the most-loved employee by some of the city employees because they are kind of comfortable with the world the way it is,” Pascarella told local officials Tuesday during a discussion about service sharing.
The talk was given to the Trumbull County Roundtable, which meets regularly and receives encouragement from the Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber.
About 15 officials from Trumbull and Mahoning counties attended.
“I don’t know how many times ... I’ve been told this won’t work for this reason, it won’t work for that reason,” Pascarella said.
Pascarella, speaking at the Howland Township Administration Building, said he has gotten that type of response every time he has proposed a plan that involves local governments sharing resources to improve efficiency.
So Pascarella, a longtime professor of public administration at Kent State University and Hiram College and four-year Tallmadge official, said he listens to all the reasons the employees give.
“Then I say, ‘Now, let’s get together and figure out how to make this work.’”
That strategy has worked while consolidating four emergency-dispatching operations into one and consolidating the county and city building departments.
“I think I’ve saved a lot of people’s jobs, and I feel good when I go home at night,” he said.
In the case of the consolidation of dispatching operations, police and firefighters aggressively campaigned against the idea, even showing up at a council meeting to say, “It won’t work.”
They argued that response times would suffer, and the dispatchers wouldn’t know the street names, but those issues were worked out.
“Most citizens have no idea we even did this,” Pascarella said, and after a few months, there were police and fire workers who agreed that the idea works, Pascarella said.
The plan, which moved dispatching to the nearby city of Stow a little more than a year ago, is saving Tallmadge nearly $500,000 a year.
Eliminating Tallmadge’s building department will save between $50,000 and $180,000 per year, Pascarella said.
And cooperation with neighboring Brimfield Township has resulted in a joint economic-development district that has produced a dozen or more businesses along Interstate 76 and revenue of $271,000 per year for Tallmadge.