County Government, 10 years after (June 29, 30, 2007)
By the time county government was abolished in 1997, I’d written at least two series (in 1979 and 1983) about the state’s long-stated plans to do away with a “corrupt” form of government that served a useful purpose here, as a bulwark and a buffer between small towns and Beacon Hill. Heated battles, including the threat to lock the state out of the county-owned courthouse, may be forgotten, but this was a helpful “look-back” at what we lost. As a reporter who covered Franklin County Commissioners every Tuesday as they repeatedly stood up to state and federal government on behalf of small towns and rural interests otherwise ignored or overlooked by bureaucracy, I’ve had a healthy respect for the traditional value of a regional perspective in planning for and meeting our common needs.
(First of two parts)
The “County of Franklin” existed for 186 years, but the government that built and maintained the Greenfield courthouse didn’t start coming into its own until its last few decades.
That’s when county commissioners — the three-person board that controlled the courts, the jail and the deeds registry — began imagining a new reality.
The 725-square-mile territory had defined itself as a distinct region since breaking off from the larger Hampshire County in 1811. But times were changing, and county government began to change with it.
Franklin County government, which ended 10 years ago this week, was caught up in its last couple of decades with a flurry of creative activity as well as a battle to survive for the sake of serving its 26 rural towns.
While most of the parts of the country have counties that provide a vast array of key services, county government here was set up “back when lawyers and prisoners were showing up on horseback,” said Jay DiPucchio, who served as county administrator beginning in 1988. Some eastern Massachusetts counties developed golf courses and hospitals, but Franklin County commissioners recognized that towns here needed a way to share services and needed a grass-roots layer between local and state government in a world that was getting more complex.
“It was beyond the time when a board of selectmen could figure out they needed to raise money for six wide planks to put over a brook,” said DiPucchio. “Now they needed engineers, planners and people to address social issues that crossed town boundaries.”
First came a 13-member county planning board, in May 1962, which The Recorder reported would “concern itself with county and regional problems” — especially, at the outset, the changes brought about by completion of Interstate 91 here.
County government started spinning new ideas as the infusion of federal money for planning and human services combined with the revolutionary spirit of Daniel Shays and the aftermath of the 1960s.
“We started to do things county government had never done before,” said Thomas W. Merrigan of Greenfield, elected in 1970 as the first Democratic Franklin County commissioner on a platform that county government “should be doing more things, connecting with all of these towns and doing some regional planning.”
Regional planners would help to slow and question a rush of major proposals, which ultimately failed: a plan to pump water from the Connecticut River for metro Boston’s water supply, to dump eastern Massachusetts garbage on the Montague Plains, and to build a twin nuclear plant there.
And county commissioners, whose main job for decades had been simply to oversee relocation of a network of roads and to approve the budget for the jail and the courts, blazed bold new paths: helping create a regional antipoverty agency — Franklin Community Action Corp. — in the 1960s, the state’s first regional housing authority, as well as a solid waste district, and regional inspection, transportation and energy programs in the 1970s.
The self-described “hired gun” behind many of those innovations was Fred J. Muehl, who Merrigan’s board hired in 1972 as planning director.
“Fred was very sharp and forward-looking. It was kind of overwhelming,” recalls John F. Bassett of Turners Falls, who was elected in 1976. “You’d go in every Tuesday and Fred would have new ideas, and you’d wonder how you were going to float them.”
Muehl, who left the county in the 1980s to work in Maine, pointed to federal housing, planning and other initiatives and opportunities commissioners could seize to deal with increasingly complex issues.
Under his guidance, they hired a human services coordinator to help a new array of nonprofit agencies get matching federal money and avoid duplicating programs. In its heyday, the county was providing $225,000 to agencies, which they could use as seed money to get other grants.
Muehl said, “The feds were giving out big piles of money if we could prove federal programs had caused concentrations of urban, blighted, decadent neighborhoods. I said, If you look back over the last 10 years, you’ll see that every nickel of subsidy money is coming to Greenfield and Montague. They’re doing in Franklin County what they’re accused of doing in urban areas, targeting all low-income and elderly housing money to those two towns, and the rest of the towns don’t get anything. That’s discrimination, and the feds ought to pay for that.”
As a result, Franklin County was the only rural area in the country to win a $1 million Areawide Housing Opportunities grant, and the housing authority was formed as an independent agency.
“One of the things I liked in Franklin County was that the resistance (to change) was a challenge, not a block,” Muehl remembers. “They’d say if you’ve got a better idea, prove it — not that I don’t want to change or I don’t like change. I always respected the area for that.”
One controversial idea they rejected was creation of a regional land use plan, which would have given the planning board say over major developments like the Montague nuclear plant. Such control was enacted on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard.
With the new planning board’s membership and participation beefed up in the ’70s, a countywide dialogue explored ways county government could move beyond statutory obligations to help small towns deal with increasing pressures and state mandates.
If Franklin County hung together as a region — with county commissioners advocating on Beacon Hill for the interests of rural communities — it was helped by the insistence in the early 1960s that it also be defined as a region for planning purposes. That isn’t the case in Hampshire and Hampden counties, for example, where the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission serves that function.
“That was the cornerstone of everything else they were able to accomplish years later,” said DiPucchio. As the state threatened to abolish counties, taking control of the court system in 1979, followed by the county extension service and ultimately the jails and registries, “Regional land-use planning and economic planning was the elder child, and everything was part of one organization. There was more there’ that we could use to communicate to the commonwealth, This is what’s special about this region. It’s comprehensive.'”
The planning board also created a venue, he said, “for a continuing regional conversation about what we are, what we need, where we’re going and connect municipalities with each other around those issues,” DiPucchio said.
A time of pressures
As the county began to provide more planning, group purchasing, engineering and other services, there was friction from Greenfield, which paid a larger share of the county assessment.
“We were kind of sticking our necks out,” remembered Merrigan. “People in my hometown of Greenfield were saying, “Why are we spending the largest amount of money for the county budget, and we’re not getting the services the small towns are?’ It used to bother me. We’re the county seat, trying to be hospitable.”
Pressure intensified around the time Proposition 2 reflected increasing property taxes in the towns.
“All of a sudden, they were strapped in their ability to raise money,” said Everett Hatch, a commissioner from Greenfield in the 1980s. “The first place they started cutting was the counties. Then came Prop 2 and boom! The crunch was on and one thing after another kept going. The big target was in the human service area.”
Commissioners had to defend their proposed budget before a county finance board and also before a legislative committee in Boston.
“It was frustrating,” Hatch said. “We were trying to make a budget and do things but |couldn’t. We were like windmills: we could bat our arms around, but no one was going to pay attention to us, and they weren’t going to.”
Once the commonwealth took over the courts, commissioners also found themselves as landlords in the courthouse, where the state occupied most of the space and was so far behind in paying rent that the county threatened to have the locks changed.
“They didn’t care about our costs,” said Bassett. “One of the reasons we proposed locking them out was that the courthouse was built with county money, and they never wanted to recognize we wanted a fair shake in rental money.” Although a judge’s warning that she would throw them in jail got commissioners to call off the locksmith they had contacted, Bassett said, “I always felt if we had done it, Hampshire, Berkshire and the rest would have fallen in line.”
The greatest fear for the county was that it could be held liable if there were fire in the ancient county-owned jail that failed to meet federal safety standards.
County government, which was serving an important function for small, rural towns here, was being attacked in the Statehouse as a wasteful anachronism that smacked of cronyism.
“They thought it was a rip-off of the people in Middlesex,” said Merrigan. “I’m sorry Boston was in such a hurry to get rid of county government in these rural areas where it was very efficient.”
There were two failed local charter attempts in the late 1980s to save county government — one that would have created a town-appointed county legislature, and a second with an elected legislature that made a clear split between the statutory jail and registry functions on the one hand that would be paid for by the state and deeds fees, respectively, and “regional services” functions to be paid for with a town assessment.
“The Legislature couldn’t get their heads around that charter,” DiPucchio said, and feared that the more bloated other counties — which had a way of co-opting any momentum to save county government — would scream, “me, too.”
Abolish us, please
With courthouse expenses rising, money for community-service programs dwindling and the state’s call for abolition growing stronger, DiPucchio pushed for an innovative approach: ask the state to be the first of the 14 counties to be abolished. Neighboring counties, he said, “thought we were crazy.”
“We said maybe this perennial threat can be an opportunity for us,” said DiPucchio. “We’ll propose to abolish ourselves. We’ll show the state how it can be done, how it can be financed, how it will improve governance operations. What we want in exchange is an opportunity to recreate ourselves in a form that actually serves our municipalities.”
That form, a “council of governments” model used in other parts of the country, was accepted by voters in each of the 26 towns.
In daring to put its future on the line, DiPucchio recalls, “We stood on the shoulders of Fred Muehl and commissioners from that era who could see over the fence.’ This is what we had to do: We had to take that risk. We’d have ended up with no programs; the towns would have been on their own.”
– RICHIE DAVIS