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www.HartfordBusiness.com • October 23, 2017 • Hartford Business Journal 9 Husky-sized plan options at Chihuahua-sized prices. 1 Oxford HMO products are underwritten by Oxford Health Plans (CT), Inc. Oxford insurance products are underwritten by Oxford Health Insurance, Inc. 2 UnitedHealthcare Service Statistics average for Connecticut, New York and New Jersey Oxford plan members from Jan. 1, 2016, through Dec. 31, 2016, based upon United Experience Surveys. Source: Internal Consumer and Customer Call Center Metrics. 3 Based on an analysis of Oxford Freedom Network plans in Connecticut compared to Oxford Liberty Network plans in Connecticut. Savings varies by county. 4 Not available with Connecticut Liberty Network HSA plans. MT1154122.0 Oxford Health Plans LLC. All rights reserved. CT-17-548 17-5325 While some health insurance companies come and go, Oxford 1 has a 30-year track record serving Connecticut businesses and is committed to the Connecticut market. We have a 96 percent member service satisfaction 2 rating, competitively priced Oxford Gold and Silver Freedom Network plans, and can provide employers with up to 11 percent 3 savings on products being introduced with our new lower-cost Liberty Network in Connecticut. These plans offer in-network access to primary care physicians (PCPs) at a $0 copayment and have lower urgent care copayments. 4 Health Savings Account (HSA) options are also available. Isn't it time you made the switch? Jonathan the Husky Mascot Choose Oxford for stability, competitive rates and local expertise. Get an Oxford quote today. Visit uhc.com/StabilityCT or contact your broker. Ask about our networks: Freedom I Liberty UHC_CT_Husky_Hartford_4.875x13.875_rd3a.indd 1 9/29/17 8:03 AM and Waterford in the 1960s and Ansonia, Derby, Shelton, and Seymour in the 1970s, but they never materialized, OLR found. More common is when boroughs or villages within a municipality have been con- solidated with the town government. A recent example took place in the 1980s, when Wil- limantic merged back into Windham after 90 years of independence. Municipal merg- ers require the approval of both town governments as well as a special act from the legis- lature, OLR said. Assuming two dance partners got that far, could mu- nicipal mergers be a broader strategy for Connecticut, with its long-term structural budget issues, to operate leaner? The potential may be limited, said Ste- phen Eide, senior fellow at free-market think tank The Manhattan Institute, who has researched Connecticut. "It's a very rare situation to find a healthy community that wants to merge with a healthy community," or a financially ailing one, Eide said. If that situation arises and both sides agree, it might be worth a shot, he said. But one of the biggest hur- dles is that perceived savings are typically from job cuts. "In the corporate world when you hear 'merger,' people im- mediately start thinking 'Am I going to lose my job?' " he said. Even if Connecticut had a practical way to redesign its local-rule government structure, Eide said it may not be correct to assume a replacement like a county system would be any more efficient. Regionalization opportunities A municipal merger can be seen as the ultimate form of regionalization, and efforts to share services and costs are nothing new in Connecticut. Regional school districts and wastewater plants are two long-standing examples. Some towns have teamed up to woo new developments and businesses or gain better lever- age when purchasing equip- ment and goods. The state has provided seed money for a number of shared-service programs, often coordinated through regional councils of government, via its Regional Performance Incen - tive Program (RPIP), which has doled out more than $18 million in grants since 2008. Many of those programs have resulted in modest savings, according to RPIP's annual reports. But some regionalization initiatives that could have saved bigger bucks have fallen flat. Perhaps the largest was an attempt to consolidate the more than 100 emergency call centers in the state several years ago. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in 2013 estimated that reducing the call centers down to one per county could shave as much as $66 million in annual operating costs, a 60 percent reduction. But some local and police officials balked at the idea and it didn't gain traction. Gara, the small towns lobbyist, sees the failure to follow through on the 911 con- solidations as "the poster child of Connecticut's inef- ficiencies." Bronin has been an advocate for deeper regional- ization since be- coming Hartford mayor last year. At a recent UConn Law School event on mu- nicipal distress, Bronin said 911 call centers would be the "most obvious example" of consolidation that should happen. He even floated the idea of having a regional police and fire department. "If New York City and the five boroughs can have one police department and one fire department you've got to think that Hartford and West Hartford and East Hartford and, you know, Newington and Windsor and Wethersfield could get away with doing it too," he said. "Now that politi- cally becomes difficult, but it's not difficult in any other way. It's only political." Rep. Jonathan Steinberg (D-Westport) said regionalism efforts get plenty of push- back, but more towns would be in better shape if they had worked together earlier. Some towns, he said, didn't realize how big of an impact the state's fiscal crisis would have on their own local budgets. "It was brought home to roost in last year's budget," he said. "We cut everything that wasn't nailed down." Gara said towns need the legislature to step in. "They need to address the collective-bargaining issues that end up hamstringing towns," she said. CCM continues to push the legislature to make it easier for municipalities to deal with their worker unions. One policy CCM has pushed for is not allowing municipalities to bargain away their right to sharing arrangements with other communities. It also wants to streamline local col- lective bargaining, perhaps by establishing a bargaining unit for multiple towns. Such options may run into strong union opposition, but Maloney sees them as more practical solutions than municipal mergers. "I think towns feel very strongly about individual characteristics of their own communities," he said. CT's Distressed Municipalities The state Department of Economic and Community Development annually ranks the 25 most distressed municipalities, calculating scores based on unemployment, poverty, housing stock, job creation, population, per-capita income and other factors. Here are the rankings as of Sept. 2017. Rank Municipality 1 New London 2 Ansonia 3 Waterbury 4 Derby 5 New Britain Rank Municipality 6 Hartford 7 Bridgeport 8 Putnam 9 East Hartford 10 West Haven Source: The state Department of Economic and Community Development Stephen Eide, Senior Fellow, The Manhattan Institute Kevin Maloney, Communications Director, Connecticut Conference of Municipalities Betsy Gara, President, Connecticut Council of Small Towns