The County of Union is proud to have saved municipalities nearly a half of a million dollars since the fall of 2006 through its Shared Service initiative. The County of Union has facilitated four Shared Service workshops in which potential ideas for cost saving program sharing were discussed. Two of these were general workshops held in September of 2006 and January of 2007. The other two workshops were program specific – Information Technologies in May of 2007 and Purchasing in September of 2007. We anticipate hosting another workshop in May of this year on Parks and Recreation. The County’s Public Works and Engineering Department meets with towns annually and shares equipment and manpower with municipalities upon request. The County used grant funding to assist the municipalities of Berkeley Heights, Summit and New Providence with an E-911 Study which examined the feasibility of consolidating the emergency dispatch centers of the municipalities. We have offered municipal automotive technicians ASE (Automotive Service Excellence) training through a cooperative agreement with Vo-Tech and Union County College and eight municipal employees participated. Our Bureau of Information Technology has assisted many towns with assessments, support and GIS training and has published GIS layers for towns. One city also stores asset management software on the county network. The County servers have been used for the InfoCop application for twelve of our municipalities, which allows remote access of law enforcement information. We have installed laptop computers in police patrol cars. Additionally, we offered the services of County Shared Services Consultant to the municipalities at no charge this January. To date, two municipalities, Rahway and Union, have met with the consultant. Both municipalities came up with ideas on how they can share some costs with surrounding towns and have reached out to towns with these ideas. For more information on Union County’s Shared Services, contact Cherron Rountree, director of Intergovernmental Relations, (908) 527-4291 or crountree@ucnj.org |