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As the saying goes, you can’t bake a cake without breaking a few eggs. Another is that if you lose a negotiation, you can end up with egg on your face.
Both might apply to the sometimes rocky path that Scotia and Glenville took to arrive at a new agreement on water rates.
And it’s a message to public officials that if they stick with the goal of serving taxpayers, the rewards can be worth the trouble it takes to get there.
Sharing agreements usually focus on services that overlap such as emergency services or plowing of roads or administrative functions such as tax collection. But they also include matters like sharing of water and wastewater treatment service.
Conflicts in these deals are often more difficult to resolve because the municipality with the existing facility wants to offset its own costs by charging others for its service, while also providing a hometown discount to its residents.
On the other side, the municipality seeking use of that service doesn’t want to pay an exorbitant cost for buying what another community is selling, but also wants to avoid the cost of building its own facility.
That’s essentially been the situation in Scotia and Glenville with the water. Scotia already provides water to some Glenville residents from Scotia’s Water District No. 2, so the village and town were already sharing the service. The problem came down to a dispute over the ongoing rate the town was paying for the water compared to the much lower rate Scotia was charging its own residents.
It’s no surprise this issue came to a head, to the point where Glenville officials were threatening to end the agreement with Scotia and build their own water plant to serve their residents.
This would have created a financial hardship for both communities. Scotia would have lost a major customer and therefore been forced to shift the cost of operating the water system solely to village residents.
Glenville would have saved the money it pays to Scotia for water, but would have had to spend perhaps $3 million on a new water plant.
No one was going to win if they split.
So they decided that cooperating was better for their respective taxpayers than going their separate ways.
The village ended up agreeing to accept less money from Glenville than it wanted to, and Glenville agreed to pay more than it wanted to.
With a new 20-year agreement on the table, the two communities won’t have to have this dispute every three or four years like they do now.
For the two communities, this demonstrates that they can find compromise over shared services when they’re determined.
It also paves the way for future opportunities to cooperate.
In an April 26 column, columnist Andrew Waite outlined some of those opportunities that included possible merging of fire and police services, as well as a possible future dissolution of the village or merger of the village and town.
For those on the outside looking in, the resolution of this dispute should provide hope that even if both sides are far apart on an opportunity — and even if they each express some hostility or political differences at times — if their ultimate goal is to serve taxpayers, compromise is always possible.
Categories: Editorial, Email Newsletter, Opinion
