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>County gets consolidation responses

By DAVID HULSE

MONTICELLO — Several Sullivan taxing authorities are interested in talking about some form of consolidated services.

With the April 26 expiration for local applications to a $150,000 pool of "Vision 2009" county grants, Sullivan officials said Tuesday that they received eight positive responses from towns, villages, fire districts and ambulance corps.

The Town of Thompson, Village of Monticello and the Monticello School District have submitted an application that, in part, discusses consolidated highway department services, according to county spokesman Glenn Pontier.

Other fire districts considering merger have applied, including the Callicoon and Hortonville districts and the Moutaindale and Woodridge districts.

Tusten has applied to another section of the 2009 program seeking to share fuel and energy purchases. With de-regulation of electrical power suppliers, County Manager Jonathan Drapkin is considering forming a consortium of local authorities to buy power at a better price. Pontier said six separate applications have been received for this initiative.

In coming months, Sullivan will flesh out the details of the applications to try and match them with consultants who would undertake the studies.

Drapkin is taking an active role regionally in discussions both of government services consolidation and joint energy purchasing. Both are new concepts, but are being considered widely by many other governments, Pontier said.

The Sullivan County Legislature has had a role as well in recent charter committee discussions of consolidated tax collection and a district court system.

The committee met again last week with representatives of the Sullivan County Bar Association and several town justices. "We didn’t set out to do this because the existing systems were broken," said Legislator Rodney Gaebel (RC-5). "But if we can save money and provide the same services, we’ve got an obligation to talk about it," he added.

Charter committee meetings will continue on May 18 at 4:00 p.m. with the justices and on May 20 at 9:30 a.m. with the tax collectors.