Working together just makes sense. Young children learn this in school, but sometimes remembering those early lessons takes a little time for us adults.

A great case in point is the decades-long problems that have occurred because city police and county sheriff’s leaders could never work together long enough to merge the city and county emergency dispatching centers.

Finally, cooler heads and smaller egos prevailed and the two agencies are expecting to move into the new Natchez-Adams County dispatch operations center in the next few months.

The move will certainly improve problems that have occurred in the past when calls were dropped by accident when transferred from one agency to the next.

Beyond that, however, the sharing of resources should ultimately make good financial sense too. Certainly by combining forces economies of scale can be realized.

The move also prompts us to ponder — what else in city and county government would be better if resources were to be combined.

We strongly urge city and county leaders to think this way and do some research on the topic.

Years ago, the then separate city and county tax collectors offices were combined which proved to be a sound move.

Would having a single public works/road department mean a more efficient operation?

How much tax money could be saved if a single department handled the accounting for both entities?

For that matter, how much more efficient would government be if the current number of elected officials was reduced? Does our area need six aldermen and five supervisors to run smoothly?

Those are tough questions, but ones to which residents need to be demanding answers. Streamlining government makes sense, and our community has taken a good, next step, in doing this with the revised dispatching centers.