Nineveh and Hensley township officials sign and adopt the resolution to merge their townships at a public meeting Tuesday night at Trafalgar Town Hall. The merged townships will be known as Southern Johnson Township. Erika Malone | Daily Journal
Hensley and Nineveh townships are making history as the second group of Indiana townships to merge.
After action taken on Tuesday, they will collectively be known as Southern Johnson Township beginning in 2026.
Hensley and Nineveh townships held their final joint meeting and public hearing Tuesday night at Trafalgar Town Hall. The two township boards adopted a resolution to officially merge on their own terms.
The boards talked about merging at two previous joint meetings, where there were only a couple of public comments. The Tuesday meeting had no further public comments.
The township merger will go into effect Jan. 1, 2026, combining the two boards and two trustees into one and creating a budget to serve the residents of both townships as one government unit.
Since the next township elections won’t take place before the merger is complete, the boards and trustees decided among themselves who would serve the township for the first year. Three board members and one trustee had to give up their elected office.
Current Nineveh Township Trustee Jonetta Knight will be Southern Johnson Township’s first trustee. The boards decided that Hensley Township Trustee Beth Baird, Hensley Township board member Nicole Ford and Nineveh Township board member Bill Meredith will be the first to serve on the new board.
These members will serve until the end of 2026, with the township trustee and board seats to be on the ballot during the primary and general election that year. Residents of either township will be eligible to run for trustee. The board will have one seat each for a resident of Nineveh Township and Hensley Township, while the third member will be an at-large member who could live in either township.
The township boards will each make a budget and will also work on a budget notice for the merged township that will be submitted through the Nineveh Township portal on Gateway, said Jeff Bellamy, the townships’ attorney.
The townships expect to save about $12,856 in 2026 with the merger. This is possible by paying fewer salaries and cutting redundancies in rent and utility payments, said Gail Snyder, a local government consultant, and Knight at a previous meeting.
The merger allows tax dollars collected from both townships to be pooled together to benefit residents who need assistance and maintain the four cemeteries the townships manage. Other costs that would be reduced include advertising, software, bookkeeping services, utilities, insurance and rent. The savings, however, could change as costs go up or other costs appear, Baird said.
Nineveh and Hensley townships had originally hoped to merge with Blue River Township to make one unified southern township; however, Blue River Township officials did not want to move forward with the merger. With Tuesday night’s vote, Johnson County will soon be home to the only two merged townships in the state.
Franklin, Needham and Union townships made history by becoming the first to merge in 2022. The three townships are now known as Franklin Union Needham Township, or FUN Township for short. FUN provides services for residents of Franklin, old town Bargersville and surrounding rural areas. It manages the rural cemeteries in central Johnson County.
Township officials began merger talks both to combine their revenues to better serve residents and because they feel the state will eventually force a merger. Township mergers were first suggested by the Kernan Shepard report commissioned during the Gov. Mitch Daniels administration. Though Indiana townships have been able to merge after a state law allowing mergers passed in 2008, none had attempted it until 2022.
Each year, bills to forcibly merge townships are brought to the Indiana Statehouse, including House Bill 1233 this past session, which would have dissolved all townships and shifted township duties to one trustee in charge of each Indiana county. The bill, which ultimately did not pass, would have exempted Marion County.
FUN Township Trustee Lydia Wales’s takeaway from a discussion with Gov. Mike Braun in June was that the state wants townships to merge. Having fewer townships will make it easier for the State Board of Accounts to track township finances. If the number of townships was cut in half, the SBOA would have its workload cut significantly, allowing state workers to catch issues sooner, she previously said.
There have also been many issues with fraud among township trustees coming to light in northern Indiana and in the Columbus area. This has brought a renewed focus on township mergers. The Indiana Township Association has advised counties to merge on their own terms to avoid being forced by the state, Wales said.
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