EVANSVILLE— The coming week will be a pivotal one in the referendum campaign on Evansville-Vanderburgh County government consolidation.
Planned events include a live televised forum at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the WNIN-PBS9 television studio and two local appearances earlier in the week by Carol Marinovich, first mayor of the Unified Government of Wyandotte County/Kansas City, Kan.
Vanderburgh County voters will decide in a Nov. 6 referendum vote whether to consolidate separate city and county governments.
Wednesday's hourlong forum at WNIN offers a reprise of sorts of the 2011 Evansville mayoral campaign, as Mayor Lloyd Winnecke argues for consolidation and County Treasurer Rick Davis argues in opposition. Winnecke will be joined by Greg Wathen, president of the Economic Development Coalition of Southwest Indiana. Davis will be joined by Bruce Ungethiem, co-chairman of Citizens Opposed to Reorganization in Evansville. or CORE.
Marinovich, whose appearances are being promoted by pro-consolidation group Yes! for Unification, is expected to bring a strongly pro-consolidation viewpoint to Evansville. She comes to the city at the invitation of the League of Women Voters of Southwestern Indiana, which launched the current drive for consolidation in 2009 with a voter petition drive.
Marinovich will speak at 6:30 p.m. Monday during a "Young Voters Forum" at Yes! for Unification headquarters at 323 Main Street. Members of the Young Professionals Network and the Rotaract Club of Evansville, another young professionals group, are co-hosting the event with Yes! for Unification. Students from the University of Southern Indiana, the University of Evansville and Ivy Tech Community College also are expected to attend.
The "Young Voters Forum" is open to the public and free of charge, but organizers request that individuals planning to attend RSVP by calling Yes! headquarters at 812-425-5033.
Marinovich will speak again at noon Tuesday before the Rotary Club of Evansville at the Aztar Executive Conference Center.
Voters in Kansas City, a longtime manufacturing city, and Wyandotte County approved local government merger in 1997 after seeing a substantial drop in population throughout the 1970s and 80s.
The Kansas City Business Journal reported in 2011 that Marinovich had credited the consolidation for Google's decision to in March of that year to build its inaugural 1-gigabit fiber-optic network in Wyandotte County.
"When you have unified government, they only have one government to deal with, and along with a publicly owned utility, it just makes the process much easier from a communications perspective as well as from a permit perspective," Marinovich told the journal.
The former mayor also credited consolidation with attracting investment by NASCAR, retail developers and urban core redevelopers.
GOVERNING magazine, a Washington, D.C.-based journal that caters to state and local government officials and employees and journalists, wrote in 2002 that the Kansas City-Wyandotte County government consolidation had "helped the combined governments cut their workforce and trim property taxes four years running."
"No less important, the city seems to be stemming its population loss; while residents had been leaving at a rate of well over 1,000 per year through the early 1990s, KCK's population in 2000 was virtually the same as it had been in 1992," the magazine wrote.
Wednesday night's televised forum at WNIN will feature a panel of three media representatives asking questions. It is being advertised as an informal discussion and not a formal debate.
Micah Schweizer, host of WNIN's Morning Edition show on 88.3 WNIN-FM, will moderate the forum. It is one of four election specials that WNIN is producing for the Nov. 6 election.