In one of its last acts, the Chafee administration is asking department heads to come up with budgetary trims to help close a projected $34.5 million shortfall in the fiscal 2015 budget, yet another in a long line of midyear actions to help close a projected budget deficit.
You would think this constant state of budgetary agita would engender a sense of urgency for all possible forms of saving money. But that does not seem to be the case.
The latest example of a good idea strangled by wrongheaded inertia is the consolidation of public-safety dispatch. As of right now, a central dispatch receives all 911 calls and then directs them to one of 72(!) local police or fire dispatches.
A just-completed Brown University study points to unspecified savings that would result from the creation of regional dispatch centers to replace the layer of 72 dispatches. But the General Assembly wants to study the proposal through a pilot program. Really?
Gov.-elect Gina M. Raimondo should make dispatch consolidation one of the first acts of her administration and send a signal that the old way of conducting business is just not good enough. •