It's taken a bit of a hiatus, but the Butler County Council of Governments is making a comeback.

The council, commonly known as COG, is a cooperative group of municipalities that use their combined strength to achieve benefits.

The group, which has been dormant since 2018 when it last collected dues from its members, is free of dues for municipalities, Butler township manager and COG executive director Tom Knights said.

Knights said municipalities can “get involved” and “see what a council of governments really has to offer them.”

“Everyone's assumed to be included,” Jackson township manager Chris Rearick said.

Knights said there are innumerable potential benefits to participating municipalities.

“There are numerous examples of where intermunicipal cooperation just makes better government, whether it's purchasing cooperatives, stormwater cooperatives, infrastructure cooperatives,” Knights said. “I think we're only limited by our own imagination on what it can be used for.”

To that end, Knights said, the power of municipalities working together has been exemplified in the past year with the southwest Butler County stormwater collaboration, in which 10 municipalities and the county decided to tackle the Connoquenessing watershed issue together.

Rearick said the southern tier's collaboration was one of the sparks that lit the COG's resurrection.

“One of the immediate causes was the discussions we've had as a group of municipalities in the southwest corner in the county around stormwater,” Rearick said. “It got everyone thinking that there is a benefit in communicating with one another, and for the municipalities that may be interested in another service or participating, the COG could be a catalyst for collaboration.”

The southwest corner's stormwater woes, and the discussions and the study stemming from those, can be just one of many instances of regional cooperation, Knights said, as COG serves as a forum.

“That's one of the things that comes out of the collective: those regional intercooperations,” he said. “The COG can be a pretty good leader in expanding those regional ones, or expanding that same idea to other regions in the county.

“We all face the same obstacles to overcome. If you look at COG as being the central voice of all the municipalities in the county, you have a better chance of getting a wide variety of input.”

More practical than regional cooperation on wide-ranging ideas such as flooding, the COG also provides opportunities for the municipalities to jointly purchase expensive equipment, such as crack-sealers, and rent them on an as-needed basis rather than contracting out that work or making an expensive purchase on single-use tools.

But COG “is far more than just renting a crack sealer,” Knights said.

Speakers at COG meetings provide useful and relevant information, he said, and that's in addition to the cooperative approaches to impactful issues.

For Dan Santoro, Cranberry Township manager, the COG is just one instance showing how useful cooperation can be.

“It's a great effort,” Santoro said. “It's something we need to be doing more of in Butler County, working together with our counterparts.”