Reunification Now!

Today’s news of Newbury’s dire financial situation suggests one thing and one thing only: It’s time talk about REAL regionalization.

No, I’m not talking about combining our departments with theirs. The time has come to go 10 steps beyond that.

Let’s get these two crazy Newburys back together.

Seriously, who are we kidding. We can hardly tell where one border begins and one ends anyway, and the stationery expenses wouldn’t be that excessive. Hell, they can keep calling themselves Newbury or they can just stick with their preferred tags of Old Town, Byfield and, of course, Plum Island.

And while consolidating two entities with financial struggles doesn't always make sense in the business world (financial folks call it leaning two drunk sailors against each other) I see too many perks not to move forward.

• We’d have ample space for a dog park and ample supply of dogs. (Why some entrepreneurial Newburyity hasn’t opened a fee-supported dog park is beyond me.)
• Open water front types would have ALL THE OPEN WATERFRONT they could stand along Plum Island sound. Hell, they can make salt marsh grass angels along the river all summer long.
• With the OWT’s satisfied we could install a mixed use/park project on the NRA lots, generating more tax dollars for the new city and letting a city be a city.
• We’d get a nice relatively new school at Newbury elementary.
• We could more easily develop the Little River Project since land and water source would reside in the same community.
• Newburyites could boast about having a Panera in their town.
• I finally don’t have to drive one town over to get my produce and meat at Tendercrop.
• We’d have a large enough community to warrant 11 city councilors. And we'd deepen the pool of potential mayoral candidates seeking a four-year term.

Am I missing any?

The only complication I see is having the new Newburyport host the Triton Regional School.

I see three solutions:

First, we lease the school space to Salisbury and Rowley.

Second, we hand Triton and Byfield to Georgetown since they’re having school building problems.

Third, we just cut our losses and sell Byfield to a Private Equity Group or a Casino gaming company.

Together, we can make this happen.


ADD:  It occurs to me that some might know the history of our two towns. Here's the Wikipedia version.