Steve Rohleder, group chief executive of Accenture’s Health & Public Service operating group, makes an argument for towns and cities across the United States to look at shared service model for some of their functions.

Does every town in America really need its own police force, fire department, and dog catcher? Must every municipality have its own back-office administrative bureaucracy for purchasing supplies and equipment? Or might there be room for merging some of these functions among adjacent communities to save costs?

As local governments across the country grapple with huge budget shortfalls, some are trying a novel approach to saving money without making drastic service cuts. By merging, coordinating, consolidating, and contracting services with neighboring jurisdictions, local governments are finding new ways to stretch their budgets and share the cost of public services.

This is something that has been bandied about in Middleboro in the past year or two but I’m not sure that the discussion is all that serious. It can work in the corporate world so why can’t it work in the public sector as well?

I think that it could work quite nicely in this area, assuming Middleboro and the surrounding communities can forge reasonable agreements.  What do you think?

Source: Bloomberg Businessweek, March 18, 2011