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Analysis By KEVIN NEVERS With the statutory elimination last year of township assessors, and the introduction this year of a bill which would empower the Indiana State Library to force the consolidation of smaller library systems with county ones, the General Assembly is clear taking seriously the recommendations made in 2007 by the Committee on Local Government Reform (CLGR). Besides the elimination of township assessors and the consolidation of library systems, the CLGR made 25 other recommendations, including these: •The establishment of a single-person elected county chief executive, to whose purview would be transferred the responsibility for administering the duties of county auditor, treasurer, recorder, assessor, surveyor, sheriff, and coroner. •The liquidation of township government, whose functions would also be transferred to the purview of that single-person. •The creation of a single county-wide body, chaired by the chief executive, to provide all police and fire protection. Not everyone, of course, sees either the necessity or the wisdom of centralizing the majority of local government services in a single county-wide bureaucracy—whose various functionaries, appointed by the chief executive, would be unaccountable to the electorate—and indeed in its report the CLGR concedes the likelihood of opposition to its recommendations: “The transformation we propose would be disruptive, even painful in the short run. Many who have vested interests in the status quo would resist these changes with great vigor.” To say the least, that statement is a provocative one, inasmuch as it calls into question the good faith of anyone who might balk at any of the recommendations made by the CLGR. “Vested interests,” however, have a way of cutting in both directions. So who exactly are the members of the CLGR and what are their qualifications to pronounce on the inefficiency of local government and the primacy of county government? The CLGR Begin with this peculiarity in the membership CLGR: none of those charged to reform local government in Indiana ever actually made a career in local government. Gov. Mitch Daniels appointed no director of a small library to the CLGR; no police or fire chief; no township trustee or assessor. Nor did he appoint a citizen of a community whose library would be consolidated; of a municipality whose police and fire protection would be centralized; or of a rural township which would simply disappear. There is this peculiarity too: at the time of their report’s release all seven members of the CLGR resided in county seats:—four in Indianapolis, two in Fort Wayne, and one each in South Bend and Bloomington. Now county seats are the only class of municipality virtually guaranteed to benefit from a centralization of services. The mushrooming of new bureaucracies—to administer police and fire protection, assessment, poor relief—would make the county seats, far more than they already are, top-heavy concentrations of political power, with all of the economic, social, and cultural benefits which accrue to such places. Now consider each of Daniels’ appointees in turn. Joe Kernan Kernan is a popular politician and by all accounts a fine man. But he is a former holder of the single most insulated and remote public office in the state—governor—for which he prepared himself by holding the second most insulated and remote public office—big-city mayor. For Kernan government is, by the very nature of things, large, impersonal, metastasizing, and hegemonic. Randall Shepard Prior to his 23 years as chief justice of the Indiana Supreme Court, Shepard served as a Vanderburgh Superior Court judge, as executive assistant to the Evansville mayor, and as special assistant to the under-secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation. In short, at one time or another Shepard has made a living in big-city, county, state, and federal government: at every level, that is, but local government. Adam Herbert Herbert formerly served as president of the University of South Florida, then as chancellor of the State University System of Florida, and finally as president of Indiana University. It should in no way be considered a reflection on Herbert’s abilities to say that Daniels could hardly have made a less apt appointment to the CLGR than a university administrator. Higher education in the U.S. has become a gobbling monster—bloated, spendthrift, and unaccountable—far more in need of radical reform than our local government is ever going to be, statutorily constrained as it is by minimal annual levy increases. Louis Mahern Mahern is “sef-employed,” according to the website of the CLGR. According to the website of the Indianapolis Marion County Public Library (IMCPL)—whose Board of Trustees he joined in 2004—he is a “contracted lobbyist representing clients in the financial services industry as well as publishing and gaming industries.” Mahern is no more likely to champion the continued autonomy of smaller library systems than he would a new tax on casinos. Still, he should know better than anyone else that bigger library systems are not necessarily better ones. The new central branch of the IMCPL cost $150 million, fully $50 million over budget, and lurched into being along an “appalling trail of botched construction, mind-boggling cost overrun, and preposterous delays,” in the words of the architecture critic of the Indianapolis Star. Ian Rolland As chair of NiSource’s Board of Directors, Rolland was perhaps as surprised as the rest of us were when the company's officers concluded that their outsourcing of most of NiSource's corporate functions in 2005 to IBM had not, in fact or at all, made the company more efficient. That multimillion-dollar mistake, a triumph of wishful thinking over number-crunching, should serve to everyone on the CLGR as a lesson in the law of unintended consequences. Sue Ann Gilroy Gilroy, now vice-president of development for St. Vincent Hospital, is by far the most diversely experienced member of the CLGR. In addition to her terms as secretary of state, she has served as director of the Indianapolis Parks and Recreation Department, assistant to the president of then Indiana Central University, and state director for U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind. Gilroy combines Kernan's background in statewide office with Herbert's in university administration and Rolland's in big business, and so like all of them is vastly more familiar with the top-down approach to government and governance than the bottom-up one. John Stafford Now director of the Community Research Institute at Indian University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, Stafford for 20 years held positions in the Fort Wayne and Allen County governments, serving as director of strategic planning, chief of staff, director of economic development, and director of long-range planning and zoning. For a man as professionally committed as Stafford is to big-city and county government, towns and townships must seem a little like vestigial tails and the centralization of their services in county-level bureaucracies a necessary phase of Darwinian evolution. Gov. Daniels It would be unfair to accuse the CLGR—to use its own phrase—of pursuing its “vested interests.” Far more correct to say that, simply by background and preference, experience and philosophy, the membership of the CLGR could scarcely have imagined any other way to reform local government than to remove it entirely from local control, then make it bigger, then give the ultimate responsibility for running it to one person. The problem, in the end, is not with the CLGR. It reached the only conceivable conclusions given its collective world view. The problem rather is with Daniels’ appointment of so unbalanced and unrepresentative a body.
Posted 1/14/2009
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