The power of regional thinking

Connecticut is a state that values New England virtues of hardy independence and individualism. For those of us who reside in the Northwest Corner of Litchfield County, it can seem that those values are especially strong in this rather remote, lightly populated, rural region. Yet in order to be seen as having enough critical mass to receive state and federal funds to support necessary maintenance and improvements for the area, it has over the years proved worthwhile to form coalitions of municipalities, rather than trying to stand alone.

After all, in other states, such as New York, there are several layers of government that provide support for such programs: town/village/city, county and state. But Connecticut has 169 municipalities and the state; there is no county government layer here that pulls together automatic groupings of municipalities that have common interests. So geographically adjacent towns pooling together to find more revenues to support their needs has been a successful approach over the years.

At this moment, the group that represents our towns in Hartford and the wider world is the Northwest Hills Council of Governments (NHCOG), based in Goshen and made up of 21 municipal leaders in northwest Litchfield County. There has been some public scrutiny (never a bad thing) of the worth of this organization, with some trepidation over the possibility that individual towns might not have their needs expressed with the urgency they should be by a regional organization.

Yet its members are the individuals elected by town citizens to run their governments and be best educated on their towns’ top priorities. If the first selectmen aren’t deemed by the town residents to understand and represent them well, then it’s time for others to step up and run for that office.

To get a good idea of what the NHCOG does for the region, read Managing Editor Patrick Sullivan’s story on the front page this week, describing the work the group did at its Feb. 10 monthly meeting. They welcome in experts in the fields they are analyzing, like Tom Kirk, who is president of the Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority (MIRA), and who minced no words in expressing his disdain and disappointment in the way the waste disposal crisis has been planned for (or not) over the past 10 years by state and waste officials.

This is one of the most critical challenges facing our region: Twenty of the 21 towns in the NHCOG use MIRA for their waste disposal. The five-year solution of shipping the trash out of state is not a good one by anyone’s standards, so now is the time to look further ahead and try to find a better one.

The revelation that Google Fiber approached NWConnect about providing broadband service to the region makes the case for the grouping of towns to make them more attractive with population and density to such development. Access to the internet is another of the most important needs in the Northwest Corner, and if there are solutions that can be better found because of the towns’ cooperation, that is another good argument to have this coalition represent our mutual interests.

Go to www.northwesthillscog.org for more on this regional planning organization.