Is consolidation one answer?

There's been a lot of talk lately about compromise.

Compassion, too, is part of the debate. If our nation is going to save trillions of dollars and rescue the financial future for our grandchildren, great-grandchildren and generations not yet imagined, where can cuts be made that will hurt people the least?

Today we'd like to reintroduce another C word: Consolidate. In those four syllables, we believe there might be numerous routes to compromise with compassion without forsaking fiscal sanity at every level.

These are not formal proposals, but merely ideas to get creative juices flowing. If nothing else, by focusing on potential consolidation - something virtually every business in America has embraced over the past three years if it wanted to survive - we might discover other ways to operate more efficiently without compromising effectiveness.

In Kootenai County, we have a handful of pockets. Each pocket, in most cases, is served by its own school district, its own highway district, its own fire district, its own police agency and its own governing entity. Overlapping and interwoven throughout is the county government itself, with more than 700 employees.

Just for starters, let's look at school districts. If it were possible to consolidate them into one, annual savings on administrative positions and their support services alone could climb into the millions. Are the educational priorities and delivery so different in, say, Rathdrum than they are in Dalton Gardens that they must be run separately? With consolidation, schools would maintain their individual identities; would anyone really notice if there were one school board and one administration overseeing them all?

Benefits could go beyond saving money. If you know which highway district you live in, which fire district serves your home and who represents you on which school board, you're ahead of the curve. We're willing to wager that a majority of Kootenai County residents couldn't correctly fill in those blanks, and we're further willing to bet that confusion from so many pocket-sized public services discourages many citizens from voting or participating in any meaningful way.

Again, this is just food for thought, but it's better than merely chewing on your nails.