Triboard Tackles Consolidation

Where exactly savings can be found between Wilton's governing bodies is up for debate, but it appears that search will likely be conducted by someone outside those groups.

Members from the Boards of Finance, Education and Selectmen met Thursday night to continue their discussion of how to more effectively approach operations like purchasing and payroll management. Al Alper and Jim Meinhold (Finance), Karen Birck and Jim Saxe (Education) and Susan Bruschi (Selectmen - Richard Creeth was absent) seemed to agree that an examination of purchasing processes in town should be high on the list of priorities.

The Triboard is considering hiring a third party to examine both the town's governmental and educational mechanisms in an attempt to pinpoint inefficiencies or redundancies. In the past, Wilton has used the National Executive Service Corps (NESC) for similar purposes, though the board acknowledged that it may be good to first put together a scope of precisely what areas they'd like to have examined, and then offer that opportunity to a variety of bidders so as to potentially lower the cost of the study.

That scope is what was discussed at length on Thursday. Al Alper identified "several umbrella areas where [the town] tend[s] to have duality of effort," which included information technology, human resources (including payroll functions), purchasing, maintenance, and self insurance.

"Those tend to be areas where there are large dollars allocated on both the town and the education sides...if you look at those on the surface, the functions are almost exactly the same and we have managers that manage them independently of each other and the question is: can we combine them?" Alper asked.

Most members said they believed purchasing ought to be one of the key areas of any such study.

"Initially, we all agreed that purchasing was the one place where we could probably do a better job," said Karen Birck, "that no attention had been paid to how we purchased things...individual departments are making the decision about not only what to purchase but where to purchase it."

Birck said even within the school system, many different departments (separated, as she said, by buildings) order their own school supplies independently of one another, perhaps indicating a place where consolidation may make sense. There was also talk among the Triboard members of hiring a purchasing manager who would be tasked with centralizing the process and thus decreasing inefficiencies in it.

"If you take it and look at it from a process point of view, we're going to see that it is a disjointed function on both the town and the school side and I would be looking for whoever it is [that may analyze the system] to make it a more efficient process," Birck said.

Alper added that he believed there to be the substantial potential for savings in investigating and ironing out repetitions in human resources and information technology, but stressed that it would require a thorough investigation before anything could be determined.

"You don't know where that overlap is until you dive into it," he said.

Other cost saving measures on the table included pursuing a lower, blended rate for phone bills between school and town phone lines, installing town-wide wireless access (something Jim Saxe said the city of San Mateo is doing and could help save on individual internet service provider bills sporadically placed around town) and regionalization initiatives, which Susan Bruschi said the town has been looking into surrounding payroll and emergency calling processes.

The next step for the Triboard is to winnow their list of areas for a third party to look at, expected to be between two and four of the areas Alper mentioned (purchasing is almost assuredly going to be one). From there, the Triboard will draft an RFP (Request for Proposal) and concur with all the appropriate boards before taking offers from service bidders.

Alper reminded the group that "at the end of the day, the Board of Finance makes the decision because it's coming out of their line item."