By Debra Filcman/ Staff Writer
Thursday, April 6, 2006
Everyone asks a neighbor for help once in a while, even cities and towns, but there aren’t official procedures in place to do it.
That may soon change if voters approve Article 16 at Town Meeting this year. The article would create a formal mutual aid agreement, much like those used by fire departments, between the health departments of 28 cities and towns in the commonwealth.
“It’s just a structure for requesting aid from other communities,” Health Director Janice Berns said. “We already have an informal understanding with other towns; this just formalizes it.”

Nearby towns – including Dedham, Newton, Brookline, Cambridge, Watertown and most recently, Boston – signed on to the agreement.
According to the Town Meeting warrant: “This agreement is to provide for mutual aid and assistance between the municipalities entering into the agreement when the resources normally available to a municipality are not sufficient to cope with a situation which requires public health action.”
The aid could be provided in the form of supplies, personnel or a combination thereof, but is not meant to stand in lieu of each town’s respective services.
Selectman Jim Healy questioned if it would be another situation like that of the fire department’s mutual aid, where Needham provides more than it receives.
“If a town in our region decides to cut back their health department or just has a weak department, it would be reasonable for us to say no,” Board of Health Vice Chairman Denise Garlick said. “We’re not going to staff other towns’ health departments.”
The agreement isn’t meant to cover catastrophic problems like a bomb, for instance. It could, however, help with day-to-day troubles. Assistance would be utilized in an event such as a salmonella outbreak, which could easily affect 100 people at a time. Garlick referenced Arlington’s recent outbreak of hepatitis, which required 3,000 people to seek shots, as another instance in which the proposed agreement would be needed.
Boston signed as of Tuesday, which encouraged the board. Regardless, Berns emphasized, the town has the ability to refuse the mutual aid if it feels its own resources are too strained. Likewise, the town can withdraw from the agreement entirely with just 14 days notice to the other municipalities.
“But what happens if everyone says no?” Selectman Chairman John Bulian said. “What good is the agreement?
If one of the 28 towns is refused aid by one neighbor after the next, he said, the agreement becomes moot, he said.
“How many times can we say no to other towns before they say no to us?” Healy said.
Berns said these towns have already provided mutual aid to one another for years; in her tenure as director, only eight informal requests have been made for mutual aid.
“It has not been abused,” she said.
Selectman Jerry Wasserman said although he supported the idea of mutual aid, he feels various forms of aid need to be unified.
“One of the biggest lessons Katrina taught us is about lack of coordination,” Wasserman said. “At some point all of the mutual aid – fire, medical, health – need to be coordinated into one form of mutual aid. They all overlap.”
The board voted to support the article at Town Meeting.
Debra Filcman can be reached at dfilcman@cnc.com.