FOSTER — Maybe years from now, Rhode Islanders will recall an unairconditioned fire house in a quiet rural town where a couple of dozen average citizens gathered on a humid summer evening to talk about new ways of organizing local government.

A group of residents from at least four different towns met at the South Foster Fire Station last night to determine what it would take to combine Exeter, Foster, Glocester, Scituate, West Greenwich and western Coventry into one town called Westconnaug.

Rep. Nicholas Gorham, R-Coventry, whose ideas sparked the meeting, brought copies of each budget from those towns.

The group decided it would focus on three big-ticket items for municipal governments: police, public schools, and public works. It created subcommittees to look into each item.

The plan is to build a municipal budget for Westconnaug and present it to residents next year, around the time that the six towns normally begin preparing their budgets. The Westconnaug working group will meet again at the end of next month, possibly on Aug. 21 in West Greenwich.

Westconnaug comes from a historic Indian name for the region (it’s also a reservoir in Foster), and during the legislative session that ended last month, Gorham proposed a bill creating it.

The bill never made it out of a House of Representative committee, but Gorham has not given up on the idea. He hopes the group that met last night gives the idea the “flesh and bone” it so sorely lacked as a standalone bill.

It means a plan with real numbers showing how much Westconnaug could save taxpayers, what services would be combined, which would remain the same, what towns would be included, which would not.

Members batted around the possibility that the group’s focus may simply be consolidation of municipal services, of finding cheaper ways to pave roads, police towns and educate children than possible under the current system. Issues like zoning laws and town hall functions may not, after consideration, be right for merging, members said.

Then there is the question of splitting Coventry, which Gorham’s bill proposed. His argument was that the two sides of town –– the comparatively developed eastern side and the rural, sparsely populated western end

pmarcelo@projo.com