By PATTY HAMMOND

Many promises were made to cut governmental spending during recent elections. Not only is our federal government facing a huge deficit, more than a few local communities have budgetary hurdles of their own to overcome.

While most citizens expect and regularly use many governmental services, it would be difficult to find anyone who wants to pay higher taxes for any of those things. Yet most of us can’t imagine the essential services we rely upon no longer being available to us. This includes not only schools, libraries, public parks, and emergency services like police, fire departments, and ambulances, but also many other basic services we rarely think about. It’s easy to say, “Stop all governmental spending. Tear it all down!” but how will people respond when their garbage isn’t picked up, no mail is delivered, toilets won’t flush, and there’s no clean water for drinking or bathing? We expect these things to be there for us.

The real challenge is finding ways to reduce governmental costs without making anyone feel too much pain. So how can costs be cut without making our lives unbearable? One way is to embrace the concept of regionalism.

Regionalism brings together different stakeholders within a region, including governmental entities, businesses, and regular community members, to work toward achieving common economic goals. It promotes cooperation and collaboration between neighboring communities. By working together they can find ways to cut costs while fostering growth and development by each leveraging their unique strengths. Communities can share resources, build shared infrastructure, and consolidate some service provision.

A great deal of cost savings can be found in doing simple things like joining together to do bulk purchasing of supplies, as well as enacting more complex fixes like reducing the number of facilities and personnel providing the same services. Assessing and streamlining current processes, and eliminating outdated, unnecessary services can also be achieved by working together. Coordinated solutions can weave some governmental services and systems together across geographic areas. It can connect people to the things they want and need as well as to more options than they ever had before.

In most regions, the economy naturally extends over the artificial boundaries devised by people long ago to divide local communities. Plus, many people work and regularly enjoy recreational activities in different communities from where they live. In this sense, most of us have experienced regionalism throughout our lives without ever thinking about it.

While regionalism may not solve all the issues we face in our communities, it can increase job and educational opportunities, as well as improve the housing, transportation, and recreational options available to us. This has happened in some local communities already and it’s working well.

If we want a future with the services we’ve come to expect, along with efficient infrastructure, vibrant downtowns, and improvements like better delivery of goods and services, more of us need to work together.

If we’re truly serious about saving taxpayer dollars, it’s also time to increase and expand the amount of inclusive area-wide planning happening in our region. When local communities present a unified regional plan with well-thought-out priorities and can demonstrate their success at working well together to maximize efficiency, it makes the whole region more likely to secure more funding from governmental and private sources.

It’s not easy, but if all of the villages, towns, and cities in Chautauqua County communities thought long and hard about how they are linked geographically, socially, and economically they might be better able to objectively weigh how their decisions impact their neighboring counties and consider how working together could solve many of the problems they all face.

The Northern Chautauqua Community Foundation’s Local Economic Development committee believes more can be achieved for everyone when nearby communities work together. If we want our region to continue to thrive, regional collaborations are essential to build and maintain economic prosperity that benefits us all.

Patty Hammond is Economic Development Coordinator at the Northern Chautauqua Community Foundation. The Local Economic Development (LED) Initiative is a standing committee of the Northern Chautauqua Community Foundation (NCCF). Send comments or suggestions to Patty Hammond at phammond@nccfoundation.org