« Ind. Decisions - Pelley convictions upheld: Murder trial delay did not violate rule. | Main | Environment - Still more on: Impact of IDEM enforcement changes? »

Friday, February 20, 2009

Ind. Gov. - More on: "Who Are These People?"

Updating this ILB entry from Feb. 12th are two editorials today.

From the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette's editorial:

A handful of state senators demonstrated a disappointing lack of leadership in refusing to support measures that would allow the full legislature to consider common-sense changes to improve county government.

The Senate Local Government Committee rejected a resolution that would allow Hoosiers to consider eliminating the county treasurer, coroner, recorder and surveyor as constitutionally required elected offices.

Such a move would take years and approval by Hoosiers in a statewide referendum. But committee members don’t even want to give Hoosiers the chance to vote on it. * * *

And the Senate Local Government Committee drastically watered down a move that would eliminate the 1,008 townships and more than 4,000 elected officials who preside over an antiquated, inefficient form of government. Instead, the committee voted to ban township officials from hiring their relatives – a common practice – and require county councils to review township budgets. While both moves are positive, they are baby steps – and the fact that township trustees routinely hire their own spouses ought to be evidence of their too-often ethically compromised approach to spending taxpayer dollars.

With a Wednesday deadline looming to adopt bills that originated in the Senate, lawmakers should amend the bills on the floor to accomplish their original purposes.

The Senate weakened another key bill that would have replaced the county commissioners with a single county executive who would be more responsible to voters and end the bad-government practice of allowing commissioners to be both executives and legislators. Instead, senators voted 30-19 to pass a ridiculous bill that would allow a patchwork of different county government structures.

From the Evansville Courier and Press' editorial:
That the proposal to end township government in Indiana went down to defeat was no shock, although we had expected the fall to come much later in the session, when the government reform measure backed by Republican Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels reached the Indiana House.

There, House Speaker Pat Bauer, D-South Bend, had let it be known that this and other local government reform measures would get little consideration.

If proponents of this worthy bill had a chance, it was to first get it through the Indiana Senate, and then hope to fight it out in the House.

Instead, the township measure was gutted Wednesday in the Indiana Senate, where Daniels' Republican Party holds the majority. All that survived was a provision to prevent township officials from employing relatives and another to require county council review of township budgets.

Had the proposal been approved as written — and there is an outside chance it could still happen — it would have ended all township government offices not eliminated last session by the bill that targeted and took out most township assessors in Indiana.

This and other local government reform measures, recommended last year by the Kernan-Shepard Commission, are intended to downsize local government. As such, there is no better place to begin than with township government, which had a legitimate place in Hoosier life before the invention of the car and the computer. In the days of the horse and buggy, it made sense to have a nearby government office where citizens could do public business.

But no more. In an era when legitimate questions can be raised about whether we need both city and county governments, with oft overlapping services, we certainly do not need a third layer of local government.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on February 20, 2009 09:50 AM
Posted to Indiana Government