Winchester Planning Board Continues Talks on Regionalization

The idea of Winchester's town departments in the past few weeks. The Planning Board discussed their overall thoughts behind regionalization in conjunction with examining the potential collaborations between several towns in the area: Burlington, Reading, North Reading, Woburn, Stoneham, Lynnfield, Wilmington and Wakefield.

The idea of joining town management efforts with abutting towns through reorganizing departments, coordinating to share staff with other communities on specific tasks, and privatizing certain work, could potentially save the town money.

Elizabeth Cregger summed up the idea of regionalization and the proposals simply when she stated, “it's the process of assisting and identifying key issues between towns.”

Activity types listed for a possible connection of resources between towns were varied. The first of three project proposal sheets dealt with bike planning on municipal land. The second proposal centered around local zoning and planning for growth and development for the implementation of local housing production plans. And the third would examine growth areas regionally, to identify similar patterns and types of growth districts and work with other regional communities to handle the growth.

Town Planner, Betsy Ware, had an eye towards another idea, helping towns collaborate on buying expensive digital mapping software.

“GIS mapping products could be a place for sharing and savings,” Ware said. “It would be nice to jointly buy software.”

According to Board Member, Drew Bottaro, sharing employees between various towns might not be a better way for towns to regionalize.

“Sharing of personnel seems not to save on costs, simply training,” Bottaro said. “After all, they can only be in one place at a time.”