How Do We Improve Our Lives?

Analysis
We live lives unimaginable to our grandparents. We hop on an airplane and are in California in hours. We reach in our pocket and gather information from around the world or talk to anybody, anywhere. Our homes make theirs look like a hunting lodge.
How did this miraculous transformation happen? Because America is a nation of free people, able to pursue and accomplish our dreams, we are always looking around to find ways to do things better, faster and cheaper. As soon as we make something better, we start thinking about ways to do it better yet.
Whereas a majority of our ancestors worked the nation’s farms, improvements in technology have freed our time to build airplanes, computers, cell phones and labor-saving devices.
The evolution of the automobile demonstrates how this process works. About a century ago, people walked, traveled on horseback, carriage or bicycle. Clever people figured out ways to attach engines to carriages and the automobile industry was born.
It was a stepwise process. In the first couple of decades of the last century, there were almost 800 American companies making cars. The companies with the best ideas and processes gradually won out, and over time, instead of having a lot of small factories making cars all around the nation, Detroit began to specialize in vehicles and grew to be the central point of manufacture, able to make the best products at the best prices.
With this concentration, we grew from the likes of this Adams-Farwell to evermore modern cars.
I relate the story above to lay the groundwork for the topic of central dispatching of public safety personnel in Cape May County.
Our municipalities in Cape May County are or will soon be in need of upgrading their public safety dispatching equipment, and there are a couple of strong reasons why the county should take over that task from the towns. As with cars, centralizing enhances quality and reduces cost.
To the quality issue: Everybody knows that the Cape May County geography presents a challenge when storms hit, and having a single communication system for managing those needs will save valuable time and potentially lives. Further, modern communication equipment is far more robust than it used to be and far more expensive.
So, to the cost issue, it is a lot more economical to buy, install and train for one large system than it is for a dozen smaller ones. We know that pulling all the players together presents political challenges but it just must be done.
The tail can’t wag the dog; in the competitive private sector, as with the automobile example above, the best ideas win. Government does not exist in a competitive atmosphere, and when one’s existence doesn’t demand constant pushing to do things not only better and faster, but also cheaper just to keep his paycheck coming, he is freed not to worry so much about the cost.
When lives and so many tax dollars are at stake, we’ve got to muster the leadership to do what must be done. The freeholders are just now taking up this issue and have assigned it to the Office of Emergency Management, which is beginning a study to find out, among other things, which towns want to participate.
That is not leadership. The people of this county need this system and county government needs to put it in. To ask which ones want to take part perpetuates the selfish interests of fiefdoms, and drives up taxes. It’s tantamount to asking the corner grocer if he wants a Wawa next door; such people are not looking after your interests, they are looking after their own.
The county needs to make its plans now and install the system as soon as possible because there are towns which need to replace their systems immediately. Hopefully they can use the county’s backup system to tide them over until the central system is in place.
To do this, we need plans, not planning. Doing it the old way is no longer a credible option. Central dispatch is becoming common and there are ample successful examples to follow.
In talking to others about this issue, I am asked, “Aren’t some people going to lose their jobs?” The answer is, Yes. It is not going to take nearly as many people to staff one center. We must not lose sight of the fact that it has never been government’s place to provide jobs; it is government’s task to provide services to its citizens as economically as possible. In flush times, government ballooned, but with the average household bring in 7 percent less than it did 10 years ago, a return to flush times is years away.
So how do we improve our lives? For one thing, we she require better, faster and cheaper dispatching for our tax dollars, just as we do when we spend a dollar in the private economy.
Art Hall, publisher