By ROBERTA HEIMAN
Evansville Courier & Press staff writer
The first of two public input hearings on city-county consolidation Monday night left many of the attendees wanting more time for input.
The crowd of about 85 people - most of them either public officeholders or current or former employees of local government - had a lot of questions and some strong opinions they wanted to voice to the Evansville-Vanderburgh Unification Study Committee.
In the format of the hearing, the audience was divided into four separate rooms at the University of Southern Indiana and given 20 minutes to talk about each of four different and controversial consolidation issues - ranging from whether the city police and county sheriff's department should be combined, to what to do about township trustees, and how big a combined "metro council" should be.
Time ran out as most of the discussions were going strong.
Anyone who wants to say more will have a second chance today at a 7 p.m. hearing at the University of Evansville.
"We had some good suggestions that may change how we propose the final (consolidation) document," said committee member Rita Eykamp, who headed the subcommittee that studied government services.
Eykamp told the group her subcommittee thinks township trustees should continue to be in charge of poor relief under a consolidated government, but that the number of trustees could be reduced from the current eight to a total of four.
Marco Delucio, who headed the subcommittee on government structure, said its members think a combined "metro council" should not be as large as the 19-member council recommended in the failed VandiGov proposal in the 1970s.
"We feel that would be way too many," he said, suggesting instead a 13-member council in which 10 would be elected by districts, representing about 17,000 people each, and three would be elected at-large.
But Richard Mourdock, a former county commissioner and candidate for County Council, said he thinks there should be a 60-member metro council, with each member representing about 3,000 citizens.
"Every neighborhood would have its own representative," Mourdock said. He told the study committee, "If you're going to get unification to pay, the key is to increase representation."
The discussion ran out of time before getting to other details such as who should draw the district boundaries.
Richard Cannon, who chaired the subcommittee that studied health and safety services, said the group concluded it would be "very impractical and too costly" for the city to take over the suburban township fire departments. An alternative, he said, would be to establish a "fire protection board" that would coordinate the city and township departments.
But firefighters in the audience had questions that went unanswered, and their discussion left almost no time for talking about the police and sheriff's department issues in consolidation.
Cannon said merging the department could possibly lead to better utilization of personnel. But he conceded, "There would be some complications on salaries and retirement benefits.
No one voiced disagreement when Fred Padgett, chairman of the subcommittee on taxation, said unification should not take place if it resulted in tax increases.
The committee, appointed by city and county officials, plans to seek legislative approval for a referendum on city-county consolidation. If the Legislature give its approval, voters could decide the issue in November 2005.
© 2004 The E.W. Scripps Co.