Parks Official Concurs With Council Reps: Collaborative Savings Add Up Fast

By John Voket

This is the second part of an series on Newtown’s ad hoc committee exploring the possible merger of municipal and school facilities and grounds management.

Sitting in his office at Treadwell Park a couple of weeks after he and fellow Parks and Recreation officials appeared before a council ad hoc committee looking into possibly merging town and school facilities management, it took Carl Samuelson all of about 90 seconds to sum up why a similar informal and almost fully undocumented practice appears to be a windfall for taxpayers.

There were several projects at Eichler’s Cove, the town-owned beach and boat launch near the Monroe Town line. There, collaboration among parks, public works, and school facilities departments included trenching and installing all new utility services, and demolishing several buildings after they served local fire departments for training volunteers.

The project included parking and some beach wall construction, as well as screening more than 7,000 yards of dredged material that was subsequently recycled.

Mr Samuelson estimates the collaborative work on the demolition and construction, which cost taxpayers about $12,000 all told, would have cost in excess of $30,000 had it been bid out solely to private contractors.

Even though some of the beach wall construction was contracted to an outside company, town contributions in labor and materials shrank the anticipated budget, saving $20,000–$30,000, while the screening and reuse of the dredging alone saved the town as much as an additional $100,000.

“That screened material alone would have cost us $15 a ton if we had to go out an buy it,” Mr Samuelson said.

This is the type of information council volunteers on the ad hoc committee have been compiling since they were seated last winter. These Legislative Council members will eventually recommend whether merging town municipal and school facilities management makes sense for Newtown.

The volunteer panel is more than halfway through a series of interviews of local officials and employees, who would eventually be supporting such a department if the proposal put forth by Councilman Daniel Amaral comes to fruition. Ultimately, by statute however, the school district cannot be mandated into such a merger locally unless the Board of Education agrees to participate.

Fact Finding Continues

The ad-hoc committee includes Mr Amaral, Councilwoman Jan Lee Brookes, Councilman John Torok — the school district’s former business manager — and Councilwoman Patricia Llodra, who recently declared her candidacy for first selectman. Mr Amaral had been calling for a committee to be formed to explore the possible taxpayer savings and operational advantages of such a merger since late last year.

He told The Bee on several occasions that he and his constituents observed town and school workers in situations where they appeared to either be idling on work sites, or situations where subcontractors were hired to perform work that might instead be completed by town workers at a savings.

Mr Amaral also questioned publicly why certain practices, especially concerning winter chores like plowing, and warm weather grounds and facility maintenance, were being performed by a combination of school, town Highway Department, and Parks and Recreation workers using various departmental vehicles and equipment.

The veteran councilman also questioned the logic of having town crews constructing a parking lot wall and numerous landscaped staircases at Treadwell Park, a project Mr Samuelson cited as another prime example of how collaboration made dollars and sense for taxpayers.

“Our best outside quote for the wall was $260,000, and three sets of stairs was another $64,000,” Mr Samuelson said. “We installed six sets of stairs and the wall ourselves with a $55,000 excavator we purchased new and $105,000 in material.

“But we also got an $80,000 grant to offset the total cost, which brings net cost to taxpayers down well below $100,000 including the labor,” Mr Samuelson added.

And since the day that job was finished, he said the new excavator has been in constant use, excavating on a steam pipe job at the middle school, trenching utility lines at Fairfield Hills, and rolling out on several town road projects. Parks & Rec crews also backed up school facilities tradespeople with personnel and equipment installing electric utility vaults for portable classrooms at Newtown High School, and building a garden wall at the town Senior Center.

While these kinds of savings are easy to calculate or estimate after the fact, members of the council committee have maintained that some accountability, and the written validation of these savings, needs to be tracked on the record.

Until now, most of the town department heads and workers have described a collegial network that is at a point today where nothing more than a phone call needs to be made between department heads to initiate a merging of workforces, or a temporary swapping of materials on projects as small as a toilet repair or as complex as the Eichler’s Cove or Treadwell Parks projects Mr Samuelson described.

Further Savings Explained

During the May 6 meeting with parks officials, the council committee learned that parks maintenance crews work with school district and Highway Department in several other day-to-day cooperative situations. One example is snow removal, Mr Samuelson told the committee.

School custodians remove snow from sidewalks, parks crews plow the parking lots, and the Highway Department plows the roads leading to the schools.

Parks workers also shovel walkways at Booth Library, the ambulance garage, and Newtown Youth & Family Services.

If a Highway Department truck is down, Mr Samuelson said his department will help out. Another example of cooperation is when the Highway Department cuts down trees in parks and other town land, the parks official said. Function and equipment determine which department does what work.

The informal system of trading work unfortunately makes it harder to determine the real taxpayer savings because all departments contribute to it so seamlessly and cooperatively, Mr Samuelson explained.

He told the committee that the interdepartment cooperation is working, but councilman Torok countered that larger projects, at least, should be tracked. Ms Llodra added that tracking would not only clarify the real cost of work, but demonstrate the cost savings to the town.

Bob Merola, who is a nonvoting citizen representative on the committee, said that it would be important to bring the story of cooperation and cost savings to light, but agreed that every collaborative effort should be documented.