Groton — Town Councilors on Tuesday were discussing their ongoing quarrel with the city over highway funding — the city and town both have their own public works departments — when one posed a question to the city mayor.

“Marian, I’m going to go there," Councilor Diane Barber said. "Wouldn’t we alleviate all this if we only had one highway department?”

Groton City Mayor Marian Galbraith paused, then replied, "I don't know.”

"How, how could you not know?" Barber asked.

Groton is facing a potential $14.1 million loss in state aid and, because of this, town leaders who once hinted at or implied what they were thinking now bluntly point out the obvious.

“We are looking down at the end of a barrel right now,” Barber said on Wednesday. “And even if they only cut us $7 million instead of the $14 million, it’s going to be devastating to the community. Devastating. And it’s time for us to throw all of our agendas out” and find savings, she said.

She's quietly watched the town and city argue for years about road funding, and combining services makes sense to her, she said.

Galbraith said Wednesday by email, "The city is very proud of the work our highway department does and quite satisfied with the quality of our highway maintenance. It would be premature for me to comment on combining public works because we've never had a conversation on how that would work or any finding that it would result in savings."

During the meeting, Galbraith told Barber she didn't know if the move would save money "because we don't know what the standards are that are accepted by each municipality. So what if the standards that one municipality wants are not the same standards that the other municipality wants?"

Barber dismissed the argument. “I was very, very disappointed that it wasn’t, ‘Hey, let’s talk about this. Maybe this is a means to an end.’ But I was shot right down and I thought it was a lame excuse,” Barber said. If the town and city can't combine some services now, "it's never going to happen," she said.

“There is definitely validity to the question of should we combine services,” Groton City Councilor Conrad Heede said. “The question is, how do we do it and can we maintain the same level of services? ... The urgency is there now. We can’t dodge this one anymore.”

The city has long feared that if the town controlled city road maintenance, it would neglect the city roads, Heede said. But no one knows if that would be true, because the city doesn't know what standard the town uses for road maintenance. For example, the city doesn't know if the town repairs minor damage right away or waits for something to fail before fixing it, he said.

The city has sought arbitration twice in the last few years after the town cut city highway funding. In both instances, the city prevailed. In the most recent dispute, town councilors cut the city's funding request for roads by nearly half in April 2015. The city approved a 21 percent increase in the tax rate that year to cover the department.

Galbraith told councilors on Tuesday that the town's refusal to support city highways had cost taxpayers.

The panel that ruled in the city's favor told the town and city to look at their road maintenance standards, figure out why they cost different amounts, and come up with a solution.

Galbraith and Town Mayor Bruce Flax agreed to meet with the necessary highway staff in the next week and discuss hiring a consultant to do that study.

But combining departments should be on the table as well, Flax said. "I think that now there hasn't been a better time for us to sit down and look at how to save the taxpayers money, and this to me seems like low-hanging fruit," he said. "And if we did have one public works department, we would eliminate all of the yearly budget issues that we have."

Deputy City Mayor Keith Hedrick said no one has evaluated the potential of combining highway departments and it’s a complicated issue. The town and city are hiring someone to independently review the difference between how the city and town maintain roads, he said.

“The city has always cooperated to the level the town has let them cooperate," Hedrick said. "The city is ready to engage in a conversation to have the best services for everybody."

Hedrick said he’s sympathetic to taxpayers because it appears that taxes will increase. But the city can’t allow its roads to deteriorate while commuters use them, as well. The roads "get a lot of abuse. They need to be cleaned, they need to be maintained and they need to be plowed,” he said.

d.straszheim@theday.com