Health District Merger:

Great For Brookfield,

Not So Great For Newtown

Brookfield knows a good thing when it sees it.

That town’s new first selectman, Robert Silvaggi, with some support from a state health administrator, Pamela Kilby-Fox, have been pressuring Newtown’s Health District to take on public health administration for the Town of Brookfield, which has never had a full-time health department. Newtown, on the other hand, has a full-time professional health department with an established record of excellence in protecting the public’s health and welfare and the town’s environmental integrity. In 2005 Roxbury and Bridgewater, two other area towns with a shared commitment to public health and environmental quality, joined the Newtown district, and the mutual interests of the three towns have been well served by the new regional district.

From Brookfield’s perspective, the proposed merger with the Newtown Health District is an ideal match. It would address a lot of identified public health problems in that town and provide a measure of insurance against the looming consequences of many more unidentified problems — problems that may lie hidden in the septic systems of the many small lots on Candlewood Lake and Lake Lillinonah, in the wells along the intensely developed Route 7 corridor, and among the many small public water suppliers (the most of any town in the state). No wonder Brookfield’s First Selectman Silvaggi proclaimed the possible merger with Newtown’s Health District the “best fit.”

It is clear that the merger would also solve some problems for the state, which now stands next in the line of responsibility for any dysfunction that may arise in Brookfield’s public health policies and programs in the coming years. Ms Kilby-Fox, director of Local Health Administration for the state, was in town earlier this month promising the Newtown district a one-time $250,000 merger allocation payment from the state, $34,000 in reimbursements, plus another $34,000 if the district acts quickly to effect the merger before the end of the fiscal year. She also noted that the new, larger district “would be favorable to attract grants and matching funds” for special programs and outreach services. She was dangling a lot of cash in front of district officials to get them to cut ahead of the state in that line of public health responsibility for Brookfield.

We cannot help but believe that this “easy” money was intended to distract Newtown, Bridgewater, and Roxbury from the very real and potentially onerous costs associated with administering public health programs and policies in Brookfield — costs that would accrue to the residents of the health district forever. We know about the ephemeral quality of promised state grants, and we know about the hard fiscal realities of trying to maintain a high standard for public services in an environment of increasing and unpredictable demand. And what we know about both these things leads us to believe that this proposed merger is by no stretch of the imagination the “best fit” for Newtown.

Newtown’s health director, Donna Culbert, noted last week that “Brookfield has to come into this century in terms of public health practices.” To ask the towns of Newtown, Bridgewater, and Roxbury, which have a tradition of progressive public health policies and programs, to retrace their steps to help Brookfield with that difficult journey is to ask an unreasonable sacrifice of the residents of these towns. We believe any fair assessment of Brookfield’s existing and potential public health problems will bear this out.