EVANSVILLE — Speaking to Rotarians at Memorial Coliseum today, Louisville, Ky. Mayor Jerry Abramson used a broad brush to paint a generally positive portrait of the merged government he heads.
But for 10 Evansville-Vanderburgh County Reorganization Committee members and a handful of onlookers in a room at Central Library afterward, Abramson got down to the nuts and bolts of how to get consolidation approved by voters. Committee members appeared to pay rapt attention.
Louisville and Jefferson County voters rejected merger attempts in 1956, 1982, 1983, finally approving it in November 2000 after allowing small municipalities in Jefferson County to retain their governments.
Abramson told the local consolidation planners today that merger proponents made another key change to gain support in 2000. Instead of offering detailed proposals that voters could oppose on the grounds of a single objection, they proposed to merge the executive and legislative branches of government and leave the details to the merged government’s Metro Council.
“We learned, if you tell (voters) you’re going to — no, that sounds like we did something sneaky, I don’t mean to say that. What I mean to say is, we saw where we had come up short,” Abramson said. “And when somebody says, ‘My cousin’s EMS, he doesn’t want to merge,’ the rest of the plan may have been great, but they were (opposing merger) because of their cousin.”
Instead, Abramson said, merger supporters coupled their broader proposal with assurances that a 26-member Metro Council representing 25,000-person districts — with no at-large districts — would decide which elements of city and county government to merge.
Evansville-Vanderburgh County consolidation planners have proposed an 11-member Common Council, eight of whom would represent districts of about 21,500 people each. Three would be elected at-large.
“(You can tell voters), ‘You’re going to have a council member right around the corner. You need to tell (council members) that EMS shouldn’t merge, if that’s what you think,’ ” Abramson said.
Within a month of taking office in January 2003, Abramson said, he offered an ordinance merging all non-fire department local government departments.
Many opponents of the unsuccessful 2005 proposal for Evansville-Vanderburgh County consolidation, including elected officials, complained that it lacked details of how a consolidated government would be structured. The plan’s authors, the City-County Unification Study Committee, preferred to leave many specifics to a new government’s elected representatives.
“When we looked at issues such as fire protection, police protection, we did not think radical change was necessary, but that, over time, as areas developed and become urbanized and industrialized and commercialized, the need for government services is going to need to change,” Phil Fisher, the study committee coordinator, said in 2005.
“We wanted to give (the governing body) the powers to make those changes as time goes on.”
But this time, Mayor Jonathan Weinzapfel and the County Commissioners have asked for a detailed consolidation proposal.
“We are asking the reorganization committee to propose a detailed description of a merged government,” stated a February memo from the elected officials to the committee. The words “detailed description” appear in bold type.
Weinzapfel and the commissioners then listed items called for in the 2006 legislation that creates a framework for local governments to merge, including “a description of the taxing areas in which taxes to retire obligations of the reorganizing political subdivisions will be imposed.” Also required are decisions about collective bargaining and interlocal agreements and memorandums of understanding, assets and liabilities of the city and the county.
Abramson had other advice for the reorganization committee that appears to be contrary to the course it has set: Nonpartisan elections to ensure that elected officials don’t engage in partisan posturing at the expense of good government. He called Louisville-Jefferson County’s failure to effect nonpartisan elections a big mistake.
“The average person doesn’t care whether you’re Democrat or a Republican,” he said. “They want the garbage picked up, they want the potholes filled, they want jobs in the community. They want safe air to breath. They want good water to drink.
“If you want to play that game, go to (Kentucky’s state capital in) Frankfort. Go to Indianapolis. Go to Washington. Scream and yell and get nothing done. At the local level, you don’t have that choice: You’ve got to deliver.”
Rebecca Kasha, the reorganization committee’s chairwoman, said planners haven’t shown much enthusiasm for nonpartisan government because of the enormity of such a change.
“Merger itself was enough to bite off,” Kasha said. “But to go non-partisan too, might be too much to bite off.”