Regionalism Without Losing Yourself

Allegheny County is a place of hills and habits. A landscape of neighborhoods held together by rivers, routines, and long memory. We care deeply about names. About patches, parade banners, high school colors, Friday nights under the lights. That attachment is not a weakness. It’s the raw material of strong communities.

But pride alone doesn’t pick up a missed trash can. It doesn’t staff an EMS unit at three in the morning. It doesn’t keep streets moving after a long stretch of bad weather.

For too long, we’ve been offered the same false choice: regional efficiency or local identity. You either streamline or you belong. But that’s not a real choice. We can do both.

The things most people never see, procurement, specifications, training, software, dispatch logic, finance, run on a shared spine so they’re faster, cheaper, and more reliable. The things people do see, the name on the truck, the council setting service levels, the voice that answers the phone, remain rooted in place.

This isn’t about building a faceless bureaucracy. It’s about building a professional network. One spec, many crews.

Start with a service residents interact with every single week: waste. Imagine if every cart in the county matched every truck lift. Lids actually fit. Wheels don’t snap off. Routes are built on shared standards so haulers can optimize across borders instead of pretending those borders are laws of physics.

Now imagine that when something goes wrong, residents still call their local municipal number, just like they do today. But behind the scenes, that ticket feeds into a shared vendor system with clear service standards, real penalties for failure, and a dashboard that anyone can understand. You still see Mt. Lebanon or Penn Hills on the side of the truck. You just don’t see the countywide cooperative that negotiated the contract, standardized the equipment, and designed the route at a price your budget can sustain.

That’s what “sharing the pipes” looks like in real life. The invisible work is done once and done well. The visible experience still feels like home.

Fire and EMS make the case even more clearly. When the tones drop, we already act like a region. Borders fade immediately. Our systems should reflect that reality.

Credentials should travel with the provider. Training calendars should be unified. Continuing education should be portable. Radios don’t have municipal pride. Hose threads don’t know what town they’re in. Turnout gear doesn’t care whose patch is on the sleeve. Buying together, specifying once, and ditching the customization tax saves money and prevents the quiet chaos of mismatched fittings and stranded inventory.

Dispatch the closest capable unit. Measure performance honestly. Stand up shared community paramedicine teams to support high utilizers. Put pride where it belongs, on the uniform, while strengthening performance where it matters most: at the curb and at the bedside.

Even winter makes the point. Salt doesn’t carry identity. Fuel doesn’t either. Blade edges and hydraulic lines don’t care about municipal boundaries. Routes and relationships do.

We should be co-buying anything that comes on a pallet, sharing storage to prevent stockouts, and maintaining a small pool of heavy equipment, spare plow, a loader, a sweeper, that can be dispatched by rule when something breaks. Mechanics should be able to help each other because the filter is the same, the tire fits, and the mount matches.

The public will still see their driver wave from their truck on their street before the school bell rings. They just won’t see the regional logistics plan that kept the operation moving when the storm didn’t follow the forecast.

If you want a governing philosophy for all of this, it’s remarkably unglamorous and that’s a compliment. Start with the map, not the border. Put calls, tonnage, and snow routes on the wall and let real demand draw the service area.

Write service levels the way bond covenants are written: plain language, measurable outcomes, automatic remedies. Stop paying premiums for bespoke back-office systems when radios are radios, carts are carts, and software is software. Save local dollars and attention for what residents feel, the way the front door looks, sounds, and responds.

Pay each other fairly and transparently, by formula, households, lane-miles, call volume, so politics can’t yank budgets around every year.

What would people notice if we did this for just five honest budget cycles? Missed trash pickups would drop, and the ones that happen would close faster because they’re tracked in one system that doesn’t forget. Response times would stabilize or improve even as staffing pressures ease. Streets would be quieter on collection day because the routes make sense and the carts match the trucks.

In that hard-to-define way that good government has, the place would feel like it had its act together.

The most common objection isn’t technical. It’s emotional and it’s fair: if we share the pipes, don’t we risk losing ourselves?

Only if we let that happen.

Write identity into the agreements. Put it in ink that trucks carry the local shield, councils set service levels, communications speak in the town’s voice, and stations keep their traditions. Protect the symbols. They matter. They’re the civic glue that makes people pay the bill, shovel a neighbor’s sidewalk, answer the call, and show up to vote.

Back-room discipline isn’t a threat to that fabric. It’s how you make it affordable to keep.

This is not a call for consolidation. It’s a call for adulthood. No one is coming to save us from arithmetic. There is no magic wand on its way from Harrisburg or Washington.

The future belongs to regions that can do unglamorous, interoperable things together while still telling stories that feel local when residents look out their windows. Allegheny County is built for this. Our culture of competence, pride, and stubborn loyalty is exactly what a networked model of government requires.

The muscle memory is already there in volunteer companies, public works yards, dispatch centers. What’s missing is a shared spine and the will to install it.

So start modestly. Pick one service where the pipes are obviously shared waste. Define a common back-office standard. Sign a few voluntary compacts. Publish a simple scorecard the public can read without a legend.

Keep your phone number. Keep your patch. Keep your parade slot. Just put procurement, training, software, and dispatch rules on common rails. If it works, and it will, expand it. If it stumbles, fix the spec, not the identity.

Next summer, when your town’s engine rolls past, wave like you always do. You won’t see that the radios are all the same across the county, that hose threads match across valleys, that credentials live in a shared system, or that your recycling cart came from a bid that saved everyone twelve percent.

You’ll just see your neighbors doing good work in your name. That’s the point.

Build a region that moves faster, spends smarter, and still feels like home. That isn’t giving up who we are. It’s how we make sure we’re still ourselves twenty years from now, stronger because we chose to be sensible together.

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About Andrew Flynn

Andrew is a Mt. Lebanon commissioner, public finance and policy expert, volunteer firefighter, and community advocate committed to building safer, more resilient, and better-connected neighborhoods. Through public service and hands-on experience, Andrew works every day to make a positive impact in our community.

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