The city of John Day is looking into a partnership with Burns and Lakeview that would allow the three communities to share resources in an effort to cut costs.

JOHN DAY — John Day, Burns and Lakeview are looking to create a partnership to allow the three communities to share staffing, capital equipment, software, consulting and professional services.

The agreement, which still needs to be approved by all three cities, should be ready for review within 90 days, Interim City Manager Corum Ketchum said during the Oct. 11 session of the John Day City Council.

Regional Rural Revitalization Strategies, or R3 for short, looks to pool staff across its member cities through virtual teaming arrangements, according to a white paper on the proposal released in February. These virtual teams would work together on projects for a limited duration, which would allow the member communities to take on larger projects than they normally would without giving up their independence.

Pooling capital assets such as equipment also is a part of the plans for R3. These assets often sit unused in one jurisdiction when they could be put to use in another. Small cities may lack the purchasing power to acquire expensive equipment for utility line and street maintenance, among other basic needs, the white paper noted. This lack of purchasing power means rural communities often have to contract for these types of services and may have to pay extra due to the cost of bringing assets to remote rural areas.

R3 Strategies looks to break this model by assembling virtual motor pools comprised of all the available equipment of the group’s member cities. These virtual motor pools would allow resources to be made available to the entire partnership to use as the need comes up. R3 also could acquire assets on behalf of its members which they might not have been able to afford independently.

One example of this would be sharing a street sweeper. Lakeview has a street sweeper and John Day does not. Under the R3 agreement, both John Day and Burns would be able to use Lakeview’s street sweeper for community cleanup operations instead of purchasing or renting one on their own.

There are concerns, however, mostly related to how power would be shared among the three member communities. Ketchum stated at the Oct. 11 council session that John Day’s city attorney is drafting an agreement that hashes out those concerns. John Day’s attorney, Jeremy Green, also acts as the city attorney for Burns and Lakeview.

Talks about forming a partnership came about during discussions between Burns City Manager Nick Brown and former John Day City Manger Nick Green about similar goals the two cites have. Those discussions evolved into ideas about sharing a city planner and sharing costs, which led to the idea of the R3 partnership. Burns and John Day then reached out to Lakeview to gauge its interest in joining the partnership.

There are no known partnerships like R3 in effect in the state. If approved, R3 would be a precedent-setting arrangement and an experiment that other cities would monitor to see if it works. Ontario, Vale and Nyssa have expressed interest in forming a similar partnership in the future, while the city of Hines has expressed interest in joining R3.