Epsom and Pembroke will hope to see some lower health insurance costs for town employees after they agreed to share costs with some neighboring towns.

The Suncook Valley Regional Town Association, made up of representatives from Epsom, Pembroke, Chichester, Pittsfield and Barnstead, has asked the Local Government Center, which handles all of the employee benefits for their towns, to pool them together in order to lower costs. According to the association’s coordinator, Chichester Budget Committee member Bruce ***, the towns could save up to 20 percent in health insurance contributions this year.

The Local Government Center likes to work with groups of more than 100 town employees for costs such as health insurance for simplicity and success in getting lower rates.

“By grouping our respective towns together, we become one entity of over 100 employees,” said ***, of the five towns.

The town of Strafford contacted association members and requested to get on board with the health care regionalization program, and will also be included in this endeavor although they are not officially part of the association, *** said. The towns will be treated as one entity for the purpose of purchasing health insurance, he said.

While health insurance rates will likely increase for the 2009 fiscal year, the member towns of the association can still expect to pay about a four-fifths of what other towns with fewer than 100 employees are paying.

Bow also contacted the association hoping to get in on the health insurance savings, but it was a little too late in the game, *** said.

“We’re expecting we’re going to see a couple of other towns most likely join our association going forward,” *** said.

Several other resource-combining options are on the table for the association, *** said, including a regionalized approach to assessing, something that has already been done through a cooperation of New London, Sutton and Newbury.

The three towns hired a single assessor, which is included in one town’s budget each year, and gets shared among the towns. Combined, they save about $60,000 per year, *** said.

The group is in the early stages of debating that idea, but they are aggressively pursuing it, *** said. More analysis needs to be done on the demographics of the towns, and whether it would be more financially prudent to work in pairs or triples for that instead of involving all five towns.

The association is also looking into the potential of regionalizing their fire departments, something that is in the very early stages of their discussions. “That’s a big one. It’s one thing to talk about health insurance or assessing, but fire departments are a whole other matter, and we’re excited about that,” *** said. “There’s a feeling among some of the towns that it makes sense, and we as a community were very pleased to hear that within the fire departments there apparently is an understanding that it might make sense,” he said.

The association is exploring other possibilities for cooperation, including combining resources for paving, fuel purchases and buying sand and salt.

The group will publicly meet next at Grange Hall in Chichester on Tuesday, Oct. 2, at 7 p.m.