Barnstable County—one of the few thriving county governments in Massachusetts—has survived thanks largely to a tradition of capitalizing upon opportunities to deliver regional services; in two words: enterprise government.
Certain kinds of problems beg a regional solution: perhaps too big or too pervasive to be efficiently solved by individual towns, and too localized or small to be effectively handled by state government.
Barnstable County is already an exemplar of enterprise government. The county actively seeks out opportunities to provide its communities and citizens with needed services and opportunities to save money, including:
- The Cape Light Compact provides energy efficiency services—many of which are free of charge—and pools the region's energy buying power to secure better electricity prices.
- The County Extension Service provides local farmers and gardeners with advice and technical services, many of which are free of charge.
- The planning and technical service branches of the Cape Cod Commission give towns access to an award-winning "deep bench" of planners and experts in such fields as water resources, coastal resources, transportation, and urban planning.
- The Resource Development Office gives communities and qualifying organizations access to a staff of professional grant-writers, allowing them to stretch ever-tightening budgets.
- The County Dredge provides dredging services to towns when they need them, at a favorable cost.
- The Wastewater Collaborative provides a venue to cooperatively solve wastewater problems without ceding local control of solutions.
As a problem solver by nature and profession, I know there are always opportunities to make the future better than the present. For Barnstable County, these are:
- Applying the disciplines that help companies work better to make County's enterprises run more efficiently and effectively.
- Improving communications with constituents; this includes televising County Commissioners' meetings. Most people the County serves know little about what it does. How can anyone benefit from programs they do not know to exist?
- Continuing too seek out new opportunities to serve the citizens and towns of Barnstable County—opportunities that are the right size for regional solution, and solutions that are the right scale for our local and personal county government.
Government works best when it favors principles over political expediency. These principles should guide our County:
- Putting citizens first. Barnstable County has an inviolable responsibility to put the interests of its citizens first.
- Supporting the safety net. Enabling and promoting the volunteer and professional social service organizations hard at work around Cape Cod provides an extraordinary return on the County's investment.
- Protecting the environment. Most people live on Cape Cod because they are attracted to its natural environment, its built environment, and its social fabric. The delicate balance between the three must be respected and maintained.
- Maintaining quality of life. Developing innovative and responsible solutions to the big problems affecting daily life on Cape Cod: wastewater, transportation, and broadband Internet access.
- Actively promoting economic opportunity and diversity. Dependence on cyclical industries and an increasingly transient workforce are at the root of much of the strain on our society. County government has an obligation to identify and encourage promising new economic sectors that "grow well" in our sandy soil.