Hartford Business Journal

12 Hartford Business Journal • March 30, 2015 www.HartfordBusiness.com HBJ Evening of Fine Wines, color ad (10 x 6.875 inches) Insertion date: 03/30/15 A GALA WINE TASTING AND AUCTION TO SUPPORT SCHOLARSHIPS AND PROGRAMS Presenting Sponsors: Dr. Rob and Joyce Fish Honorary Chair: Geno Auriemma Your Emcees: David Fisch, Morning Radio Host, Radio 104.1 WMRQ Abbey Niezgoda, Reporter, NBC Connecticut Don't miss the premier wine event in Manchester! • Dancing • Silent and live auctions • Tasting tables featuring hundreds of wines, beers and liquors • Hors d'oeuvres and desserts by MCC's award-winning Culinary Arts students Order Tickets Online: www.MCCGiving.org Information & Tickets: 860-512-2922 Special thanks to the SBM Charitable Foundation, Inc. for their support CT municipalities experiment with shared-savings programs By John Stearns jstearns@HartfordBusiness.com S tate budget revenues won't improve anytime soon, so towns and school districts will need to find ways to trim expenses without harming public services or children's education. That means municipalities must find effi- ciencies in how they operate, House Speaker Brendan Sharkey recently told attendees of Hartford Business Journal's second annual Municipal Collaboration Summit. "We are in a time when we have to think differently," Sharkey told the group gathered March 20 at the Hartford Hilton. By "think differently" Sharkey expressed the need for municipalities to collaborate and share services to reduce their operating costs. That was a major theme expressed through- out the summit, including by panelists like former Simsbury First Selectman Mary Glass- man, who is now the manager of the Office for Regional Efficiencies at the Capitol Region Education Council (CREC), a nonprofit that offers school districts program, leadership, and other support services. Glassman works with cities and towns to promote best practices and new models of deliv- ering services, particularly in non-instructional areas like transportation, facilities manage- ment, food services and information technology. Municipalities, for example, can use CREC's cooperative purchasing programs to save money for things like office and computer sup- plies and big-ticket expenses like school furni- ture and athletic fields. Cooperative purchasing saved participat- ing districts at least $3 million cumulatively last year, according to summit panelist Don- ald Walsh, former CREC chief financial offi- cer and now a CREC project manager. Districts are saving about 10 to 20 per- cent in costs through the program, he said. "Nobody thinks that cooperative purchas- ing makes sense 100 percent of the time," Walsh said, encouraging attendees, though, to examine it. "… If you like it, try it and we think you're going to find that very often, probably most often, you're finding that it's easier to get lower prices this way than the way you've been doing it. … We think this ought to be a tool in your tool bag." CREC also offers a construction division staffed with experts who can help school dis- tricts oversee projects of all sizes. Summit panelist Christopher Cykley, project manager and safety coordinator for CREC's construction division, estimated his group has overseen about $1 billion in school projects in recent memory. The division can help in areas that include development and planning; construction man- agement; project closeout; furniture, fixture and equipment coordination; move manage- ment; and operational services management and commissioning, Cykley said. Some of those services caught the attention of semi- nar attendee Denise McNair, Berlin's town manager. Berlin is about halfway through a roughly $83 million renovation of its high school, she said. While Berlin schools and the town already share a human resources director and some grounds-keeping services, they're examining additional collabo- ration, McNair said. On school transportation, Christine Ruman, assistant manager of CREC's Office for Region- al Efficiencies, said CREC provided more than $5 million in savings last year to districts and towns that worked with its transportation divi- sion, which offers tools like routing software and scheduling experts. Asked whether schools had been fully avail- ing themselves of CREC services, Ruman said most districts have worked with CREC in edu- cation-related areas. "Our Office for Regional Efficiencies real- ly just started and I think that it may not have been something that people were talking about or thinking about, but now that that's the speaker's agenda and it's something that's really being pushed … it's on their minds," she said. "… I think that's really part of the issue why we're just ramping up now." Glastonbury Town Manager Richard Johnson said the summit's workshops helped verify Glastonbury is on the right track in its efforts to find efficiencies wher- ever possible. The town, for example, has an aggressive purchasing department and manages capital projects for the board of education, coordinates its energy-efficiency projects and maintains school grounds. The town must provide the highest level of service possible in the most cost-efficient way possible, he said. "It's the way you have to do business," Johnson said. n Former Simsbury First Selectman Mary Glassman now works for the Capitol Region Education Council where she helps cities and towns find cost savings. H B J P H O T O | J O H n S T e a r n S

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