Shared Services Committee will look for more cost-savings among county, villages and towns

ALBION – A committee that includes leaders from village, town and the county governments have begun meeting to look for more ways to share services and reduce costs of local government.

The Orleans County Shared Services Committee met for the first time on Dec. 7. The group includes County Legislature chairman, the town supervisors from the 10 towns, and the four village mayors.

The group in the initial meeting put out some ideas to potentially explore, including code enforcement, assessing and the fire service.

Right now there isn’t a uniform approach for code enforcement across the county. Some towns also are concerned about having an assessor with the extensive training required for the position.

The town and village leaders expressed their concern about the not-too-distant future for the fire service, whether there will be enough volunteers to respond to emergencies and other calls.

“We are having a very organic conversation regarding shared services,” said Jack Welch, the county chief administrative officer who is working with the committee. “Shared services cannot be forced down upon the towns and villages. This process requires willing partners to be creative in changing the means of a service to allow for a same or similar end product of a service for our residents.”

County Legislator Skip Draper said one possibility in looking at the fire service may be to reconsider how the battalions are structured. Right now the western battalion is the west end of the county and includes fire companies that serve the towns of Yates, Ridgeway and Shelby, and villages of Lyndonville and Medina. The central battalion includes Carlton, Gaines, Albion and Barre, and the eastern battalion is Clarendon, Murray/Holley and Kendall.

Draper said it may make more sense to group the battalions by northern, central and southern parts of the county. The northern towns are all along Lake Ontario and fire departments could perhaps share equipment and training with water rescues. The central area from west to east include the larger villages of Medina, Albion and Holley, which tend to be more densely populated with larger and taller buildings, Draper said. There could be opportunities to share equipment and resources among those communities.

The southern part of the county – Shelby, Barre and Clarendon – tends to be the most rural with farmland.

The local leaders say they are concerned about enough personnel for the departments. They are interested in seeing if the local BOCES and schools, as well as community colleges, can help train or at least steer students to service with the fire departments.

“We are in the infancy stage in this process of developing a list of potential areas of shared services,” Welch said. “We left the meeting asking for the participants to follow up on some of their ideas and to bring back more possibilities of sharing services to the next meeting early in 2024.”