I carefully read this story today in the Indianapolis Star, headlined "Oversight panel for BMV faces fight for its life: Allegations renew talks of putting office of governor in charge of license branches."
I then re-read the Indiana Law Blog entry of Feb. 20, 2004, which examines the BMV Commission and its responsibilities - under the law, it is a body corporate and politic, separate from the state. I recomend the entire 2/20/04 entry to interested readers.
As reported in today's Star story:
The five-member Bureau of Motor Vehicles Commission oversees license branch operations and its $70.9 million budget. But nobody controls the commission -- not the governor, the General Assembly or voters. * * *As I noted in a May 17, 2004 Indiana Law Blog entry about the new Indiana Economic Development Commission, both the BMVC and now the IEDC were established to remove their functions from the direct control of the Governor, and instead place them under the control of an "authority" insulated from the voters by layers of bureaucracy. To my mind, and as I wrote last month, that is not a good thing:The BMV Commission runs a sprawling agency of 170 license branches that handle more than 10 million transactions a year. The commission, whose members serve four-year terms, is charged with overseeing the license branches and their 1,600 employees.
The commission and the license branches are technically a separate entity from the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, a state government agency under the control of the governor's office that employs an administrative staff of about 400.
The governor appoints bipartisan members to the commission, but they are not accountable to the governor or the General Assembly, said Dan Henkel, spokesman for the BMV. It is not clear whether the governor can legally remove a member from the commission. The law does not address that issue.
Henkel maintains the commission was created to have some independence from the governor's office after years of political patronage in the agency. Some officials contend the state should eliminate the commission and make the governor's office directly responsible for the license branches.
Commission members are not accountable for their decisions, said state Rep. Ron Liggett, D-Redkey, who sat on a committee to reform the BMV in 2000. "There is no oversight," he said.
As the law now stands, economic develpment is to be moved under the control of the IEDC, a quasi-governmental agency which is chaired by the lieutenant governor, and whose hold-over membership until at least July 1, 2005 consists of the appointees of the general assembly and the university presidents. The governor does not even have a seat on the board.Posted by Marcia Oddi at June 1, 2004 04:08 PMAlthough the newly elected lieutenant governor is also to head the department of commerce, a state agency, as of July 1, 2005 much of the agency will by law be transfered, lock, stock and barrel, outside of state government and to the new IEDC. Employees of the IEDC will NOT be state employees (not unlike the bureau of motor vehicles license branch system setup).