Patching up Coalition: Group strives to revive co-op council
A county may be a single unit on a map, but zoom in and the picture is dotted with townships, municipalities and boroughs. While each has its unique needs, some essentials such as road work and snow removal are a constant among them.
Advocates of inter-municipality cooperation within the county want to revive a defunct government body known as the Butler County Council of Governments to connect all those dots and create a unified force to reduce everyday costs through buying power.
The effort met varying success when it was active, but people involved with it said there was an overall benefit in cooperation as well as a reduction in spending costs.
“Collaboration among municipal governments is paramount because that's where colleagues learn about what's going on, what's coming up, how not to recreate the wheel, and that's how you save money,” said Adam Hartwig, who served as the last executive director of the council between 2017 and 2020 before stepping down for personal reasons.
Over the past year, interest in the cooperative body waned, leaving it defunct. Former members and advocates said the council, which began in 2007, broke over the past few years in the face of increasing differences between the more rural northern part of the county and the quickly developing southern townships.
Still, advocates of local government believe the divide could be bridged with a reinvigorated council.
“It would be great if people put their heads together — is there a way to get everybody to work together collaboratively?” Hartwig said. “That would be an interesting project.”
Tom Knights is hoping to do just that.
Knights is Butler Township's manager, and he is trying to drum up interest in the council to bring it back. He believes there are a core of eight to 10 townships and municipalities that have an interest and that all government bodies could benefit from the council. He said someone would have to take the lead and send out correspondence to each municipality “and gauge their level of interest.”“You'd have to give an idea on what the intent was, as in — we're looking to bid aggregate this year for fuel storage tanks and vehicle fuel,” Knights said. “And then you'd have to come up with items that would generate the most interest in and use that as a common means to bring everyone together for a revitalization meeting.”Since the council of governments is a voluntary entity, creating a loose confederation of interested parties from their respective areas would require a hook to create general interest.“We've been struggling to get people involved still,” said Jerry Andree, the former manager of Cranberry Township who helped organize the council in the early years.“Butler County is so diversified. You've got the north, central and lower. Northern folks are what, 600 people a town, and then you compare that to somewhere like Cranberry — bridging the gap between those two is very challenging,” he said.Even basic logistics were challenging.“Meeting was hard,” Andree said. “Do you meet in the day time? Late at night? And where?”Toward the end of its existence, in 2019, the council had 31 townships and boroughs, eight water and parking authorities and one school district, according to a state directory. In total, the groups represented 124,055 people. The work they did centered around bringing down the cost of items needed for the general population.“It's not exciting stuff. It's the nuts and bolts of municipality. There's not a lot of glory in buying street signs and salt, but at the end of the day it keeps the millage down for a lot of places,” said Jeff Smith, who served as the organization's first president when it was formed in 2007.“In the early days we did a lot of positive things,” said Smith, who is now a Butler City council member. “One of the big things we did was we were able to get a grant and buy a crack sealer. That helps extend the life of roads.”The crack sealer continues to operate and is stored in Cranberry Township, where townships can rent it.Knights also said the crack sealer is an example of the benefits of the council. He said demand was so high the organization bought a second one, both of which continue to operate.And the benefits of the council of governments included other things that are less tangible. Smith said a representative from each township would attend periodic meetings with their counterparts in other areas.“It was a forum where we would all get together and talk about projects. It generated a lot of intermunicipal cooperation between neighboring municipalities,” Smith said. “It promoted some good government. People get elected to government and then wonder what to do now. We tried to build up that void.“I think it was a big success during those early years.”But ongoing development in areas such as Cranberry Township, a general loss of interest and social distancing restrictions during the coronavirus have led to a fragmentation in the county. Smith said that as the original group of participants began to phase out, some members began to lose interest.“An organization like that, a member's primary interest is their home municipality. I believed in municipal government. I spent a lot of time on the (council of governments) because I enjoyed it, liked it and cared about it,” Smith said. “They tried meeting at different places, meeting less frequently, and maybe they lost some of that continuity.”Butler County's council is not the only one that fell victim to diverging interests. The Two Rivers Council of Governments in Northampton County dissolved in 2017. In a newsletter, the Pennsylvania Association of Councils of Governments determined that “the group tried to work together to resolve problems, but it seemed that the different types of municipalities had different problems, and ultimately could not provide programs or projects that satisfied the needs of the members.”Smith said the changing landscape of Butler County made its council less relevant.“The biggest challenge was up north, because it's very rural up there, and they don't need crack seals. They're tar and chipping for the most part,” Smith said.Supervisor David Mishler, vice chairman of Cherry Township's board, agreed with that assessment. He said that as a smaller township, they had no need for the council.“We were aware of (the council). We're a relatively small township and most of our roads are dirt roads. We've found a state program called COSTARS and that's been exceedingly valuable to us,” Mishler said. “(The council) was just not useful. We're pretty much doing very well with what we have.”But Andree maintains that the benefits of the organization extend past tangible assets like the crack sealers. He now manages the Butler Southwest Storm Water group, which has been looking at ways to solve flooding issues in nine municipalities in the county's southern tier and come up with projects that could help mitigate flooding.Andree called the group a spiritual successor or subgroup to the council.“It always takes a crisis to bring people together, unfortunately,” Andree said. “But it's good to build relationships with people, so once a crisis develops you're not developing it in the middle of a crisis. Building relationships is so important.”He said that in order for the organization to start again, someone has to commit to bringing everyone together.“It's missing that right now,” he said. “It's a cyclical issue. People change. There's no process to keep things continuing between generations. Intermunicipal cooperation is often not a top goal. If that's not a priority, they'll get busy with other things that demand more immediate action.”
