April 5 - Town of Falmouth

ecession is literally changing the way we do business as a government.
We are continuing to face a contraction of our local revenues. Because of
economic factors, the amount of money generally that we have to spend
has been shrinking. And what we face now is the challenge of adopting
what we’re terming a resilient approach to successfully adapt to this
change in a way that enables us as a community to rebound stronger than
we were when we entered into the recession, and that’s really quite a tall
order.
And what it’s all about at this point in our history now is trying
to sustain our service levels, but with stable and available revenues, not
hopeful revenues.
Now, there’s an organization that’s a national think tank on
local government, called The Alliance For Innovation, and they conducted
a national study very recently called Transforming Local Government. And
through this study, what they’ve done is they’ve documented responses to
the fiscal stress that’s been caused by this very recession across the
country. And I wanted to take a little bit of time to go through some of
these issues because I think it provides a very good structure and some
context for us to use to evaluate our efforts currently. And what we’ve
learned through this study is organizations, city and town governments, in
all of the states that have successfully coped with the fiscal stress caused
by the recession, exhibit many common characteristics that have helped
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