Merging a plan in Evansville and Vandenburgh County

Indianapolis-based Bowen Engineering Corp., Weinzapfel said, "was planning to build out in the county, but they, too, saw the advantages of working in partnership with the city and locating their new Evansville offices Downtown."

What Weinzapfel did not say during that Oct. 24, 2006, speech to the Chamber of Commerce of Southwest Indiana was that a year earlier, Bowen Engineering had gotten from the City Council what it could not get from the County Council — a 10-year property tax phase-in.

Such direct city-county competition for economic development isn't unheard of, said Greg Wathen, president of the Economic Development Coalition of Southwest Indiana.

"I'd rather not talk about specific projects, but sure, it happens," Wathen said. "Even though, in essence, we're one county, competing with ourselves for the same project. ... It happens less since the coalition was formed (in 2006)."

The competition, which can drive up the costs to local taxpayers, wouldn't happen at all if Vanderburgh County had one local government instead of two, say advocates of city-county consolidation.

It is one in a wide range of financial, political, legislative and structural issues the Evansville-Vanderburgh County Reorganization Committee must grapple with as it carries out its charge to craft a proposal for consolidation.

The 12-member citizens committee was formed in February as part of the consolidation campaign triggered by a petition signature drive led by the League of Women Voters of Southwestern Indiana. After taking July off, the committee will resume meeting Thursday.

Pointing to successes of other merged governments, supporters long have argued consolidation is first and foremost a way to spark economic development, with its attendant boosts to jobs, tax base and population.

Insufficiently impressed by Bowen Engineering's promise of 22 new jobs within five years and a $1 million investment to replace its East Side office by building at Daylight Industrial Park, the County Council approved in July 2005 a phase-in of just five years.

Bowen Engineering officials immediately began exploring alternative sites within the city limits.

Within six weeks the company announced plans to purchase and renovate the old Harding Shymanski building at 233 SE Third St. A month after that, the City Council passed a preliminary resolution for a 10-year tax phase-in — this time for an estimated $666,000 in improvements to the building.

"Our total investment to be Downtown still was $1 million, both in the purchase of the property and the improvements to the building," Jeff Purdue, Bowen Engineering's senior vice president and division manager, said recently.

"It was very obvious the mayor and City Council were quote, unquote, 'open for business.' They were very accommodating and encouraging and inviting."

County Councilman Joe Kiefer, who helped kick off the consolidation drive of 2005 by pushing for it as a member of the City Council, says more economic development ultimately would reduce taxes.

"If you have more people paying into the system — new businesses, new growth in the area — it's ultimately going to lower the tax base as far as what people are saying," Kiefer said in June on "Newsmakers," a weekly public-affairs television program co-produced by WNIN-PBS9 and the Courier & Press.

Few would argue that more growth is desirable. When voters rejected the VandiGov proposal for consolidation in 1974, the county's population was 167,678. The estimated population in 2009, the latest year a figure is available from the U.S. Census Bureau, was 175,434.

Working with the county's abundance of greenfield space and the city's larger supply of existing structures, economic development professionals say they are obliged to at least listen when comparisons to other communities are made.

But arguments in favor of consolidation must be tested against the mix of local ordinances, state statutes, history and personalities that color Evansville and Vanderburgh County's collective political climate.

Within Indiana's third-largest city in population and its eighth-smallest county in area, what is the need?

Debating the layers

While most of the debate about consolidation focuses on the merits of two layers or one layer of government, in economic development there are several layers.

Prospective and expanding businesses don't rule out Evansville or Vanderburgh County in televised sessions of the County Council or the City Council, consolidation advocates say.

They do it when far fewer people are watching, sometimes in meetings held Monday mornings in a Civic Center conference room.

Evan Beck, owner and president of Woodward Commercial Realty Inc. and Woodward Development and Construction Inc., said businesses can be intimidated by the need to secure permits and approvals from multiple local government agencies.

"When you go into a project, you may be dealing with a number of agencies, whether it's Area Plan Commission, city or county council, the Board of Zoning Appeals, permitting, anything dealing with utilities, whether it's city water, sewer," said Beck, chairman of the board of the Chamber of Commerce of Southwest Indiana.

"It goes on and on and on, all the different things you have to accomplish and get completed before you actually start a project."

Beck mentioned as an example commercial-site review meetings, at which business representatives discuss permitting requirements with city and county department heads and other officials. The meetings are held Mondays at 9:30 a.m.

"It's not just the Area Plan Commission sitting at the table," he said. "You've got your surveyor, your city or county engineer, all these different people sitting around, and they all report to a lot of different people above them. That sometimes becomes complicated, where there's no kind of unified approach to that part of it."

With local government consolidation, Beck said, "you'd have fewer people reporting to fewer bosses."

Beck said the Area Plan Commission and Wathen's group have made the process more bearable for businesses by running interference for them, but it is still more work than it would be under consolidation.

But Brad Mills, director of the Area Plan Commission, said consolidation likely would change little about the commercial-site review process, which involves several local government agencies that consolidated years ago.

"As I understand the consolidation, we're still going to have the Area Plan Commission, we're still going to have the Water & Sewer Department, we're still going to have the Building Commission, we're still going to have an engineer, whether you have to go to the city engineer or the county engineer," he said.

"You don't go to both city engineer and county engineer at this time. If (a project is) in the city, you go to the city; if it's in the county, you go to the county. I mean, I don't think we're going to eliminate the county surveyor."

Businesses may need a variance for a project, Mills said, but that wouldn't change under consolidation either.

"I don't know that we're going to eliminate all of our requirements by consolidating our government," he said.

Duplication

There are other layers in other places.

Wathen pointed out that state law typically requires the approval of both the County Council, the fiscal body, and the County Commissioners, the executive governing body, to use Tax Increment Financing to support an economic development project outside the city.

"What if you get permission from the commissioners and you don't get permission from the council?" he said. "Because, say, they're different political parties or maybe somebody's upset at someone else or whatever?

"If you go through consolidation, whatever your governing body is, you're going to go to one body. You don't escape seeking the county's permission, but what you're doing is you're removing layers of bureaucracy."

Tax Increment Financing districts allow local government to set aside a certain portion of the property taxes collected within an area and use the money to pay for projects in that area.

Kiefer points to the simultaneous existence of the Evansville Economic Development Commission and the Vanderburgh County Economic Development Commission, bodies created by statute whose members work on behalf of the city and the county, respectively.

The separate commissions meet periodically, in most cases to approve financing of an economic development project by issuing bonds. Reorganization committee members haven't decided how to propose the two bodies merge or even whether they could.

Kiefer said economic development professionals have to accept that some missed opportunities never reveal themselves.

"Who knows how many businesses never gave us consideration? ... Where we might have had an advantage if we would have had a merged city-county government," he said.

Taxation without representation

In some instances, residents of Vanderburgh County are paying fees and taxes set by elected officials for whom they cannot vote — or individuals appointed by those officials.

When the public learned last year that a group of city and county elected officials decided in 2008 not to renew a local homestead credit that amounted to more than $5.1 million for the county's home-owners that year, County Council members explained they could not have reversed the decision.

That's because the City Council holds more than 70 percent of the votes on the county income tax council, a panel to which state law gives responsibility for local homestead credits. But that body, officially composed of City Council, County Council and Darmstadt Town Council members, did not meet.

In July, City Council members voted to raise rates charged for sewer services while saying they may postpone further increases until a rate study can justify the practice of charging a higher fee to residents who live outside the city's boundaries.

The rate increase is intended primarily to fund work on projects to stop flooding that damages homes and businesses on the city's Southeast Side during heavy storms.

But the 11,348 residents outside the city who receive Evansville sewer services — 40,029 residents in the city are sewer customers — may not register their agreement or disagreement by voting in City Council elections.

They also may not vote for the five-member Evansville Water & Sewer Board that recommended the increase in conjunction with officials of the utility, or the elected official who appointed the board members. That would be Weinzapfel.

The city's nearly 19,000 water customers who live outside city limits don't pay more than customers in the city, but county-only residents who receive city sewer services pay 35 percent higher rates.

The higher rates were passed in June 2002, with City Council members citing the greater distances that county-only residents' sewage had to be pumped.

In a June 10, 2002, presentation to the City Council, then-Mayor Russ Lloyd Jr. called for a rate structure in which "everybody pays their fair share and subsidies are removed."

"It should not be a surprise that it costs more to provide sewer service to county users than it does to city," Lloyd said then. "Serving a county user requires more sewer pipe and pumps to transport the sewage because they are farther away from the treatment plants."

Because the Evansville Water & Sewer Utility's $57 million budget is entirely funded by water and sewer rate payments, sewer customers who live outside the city arguably help fund everything the city department does.

Jim Garrard, interim director of the Water & Sewer Utility, said that can be justified.

"The infrastructure — the pipes, both in and out of the city, the wastewater treatment plants, which are large investments — are city-owned assets, and we're responsible for insuring them, maintaining them, making sure we run them properly," Garrard said.

"Therefore, the city people that operate this should be overseen by mayoral appointments and (City Council members) who have the full picture of not just water and sewer operations, but the entire city government operation. The people who make decisions about rates, whether they're in or out of city, should be the city leaders who are elected to run the system."

Not surprisingly, Jim Salmon does not agree.

Salmon, an Old State Road resident who has opposed the past three sewer rate increases, lives just north of the city limits.

"I don't think I'm comfortable with that," Salmon said. "It's sort of like taxation without representation, as far as I'm concerned."

Executive leadership

In the days after a deadly F-3 tornado killed 18 people at Eastbrook Mobile Home Park on Nov. 6, 2005, Cheryl Musgrave had not a moment to spare to ponder the structure of county government in Indiana.

But she recalls wondering on the morning of Nov. 14 why the County Commissioners, of which she was then president, had to convene a special meeting to pass a series of motions accepting offers of assistance in the clean up.

Stopping only to hear reports from officials who were helping formulate county government's response to the tragedy, Musgrave and Commissioners Tom Shetler Jr. and Bill Nix moved quickly, passing five motions in 19 minutes.

Musgrave, who left the commissioners in 2007 to become head of the Indiana Department of Local Government Finance, shakes her head at the memory.

"We had to hold a special meeting (of the three-member executive governing body) to take official action to deal with an emergency situation," she said. "The mayor never has to do that. The governor never has to do that. The president never has to do that.

"There could be no unified executive leadership, as there could have been if we'd had a mayor."

Volumes have been written about what critics call Indiana's antiquated local government structure, but the central fact is that it still provides simultaneously for three-member executive governing bodies to run county governments and a single chief executive to lead cities.

The reorganization committee envisions a consolidated government headed by a mayor and an 11-member Common Council that would assume all the legislative and fiscal functions now carried out by the City Council and County Council.

Musgrave, who said she would welcome such a streamlined governmental structure, wonders what could have happened if differences among the commissioners over the county's response to the tornado had hindered a unified response to the tragedy.

"It could have been bad and totally unnecessary," she said.

In 2007, philosophical differences among the County Commissioners did force the county to delete $1.1 million for two projects from a federal funding request.

Musgrave and Nix wanted $1 million to help build a 2.5-mile bicycle and running path linking Burdette Park to the University of Southern Indiana and $100,000 for an emergency telephone notification system. But Commissioner Troy Tornatta, who said he supported the Burdette Park-USI project, disagreed with Musgrave and Nix's strategy for funding it.

In the month before Tornatta took office, the commissioners awarded a $416,391 contract for the $2.5 million bike path's first phase. Musgrave and Nix used riverboat money to pay for it, with no funding guarantees beyond that.

Tornatta said the commissioners should have waited until they had the entire $2.5 million in place instead of building the path in phases.

The commissioners had sent a funding request to Indiana's U.S. senators and Rep. Brad Ellsworth, D-Ind., that was signed only by Musgrave and Nix.

Weeks later they had to send a new letter to Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., this time with Tornatta's signature — but with no mention of the Burdette Park-USI project or the emergency telephone notification system.

"(Lugar's office and Senate Appropriations Committee staffers) said a letter signed by all three commissioners would stand a better chance of success," Musgrave said at the time. A Lugar spokesman confirmed that account.

To this day, the incident rankles Musgrave.

"I told (Lugar's staff), 'You're going to let the Democrat minority member stall this?'" she said.

But Tornatta won his seat on the commissioners in 2006 by saying the all-Republican body was marching in lockstep with no dissent. He pledged to be a watchdog on the three-member body.

Just as VandiGov opponents did back in 1974, County Councilman James Raben argues there is value in having more, rather than fewer, elected representatives.

"Obviously, if it's one person to answer for everybody, they're going to get pulled in a lot of different directions," said Raben, who estimates 70 percent of his western Vanderburgh County district is outside the city.

"My big concern has been that the county residents are the ones who are going to lose all the representation (in consolidation) because they have three commissioners and they have seven council people to go to for whatever their concerns are."

Raben said he isn't against consolidating portions of city and county government — but the level of elected representation isn't the problem.

"Keep it as it is," he said.

Differing ordinances

When Democrats used their brand-new majority status on the County Commissioners in January 2009 to reinstate exemptions for bars, taverns and nightclubs in the county's smoking ban, supporters of tough anti-smoking measures were infuriated.

But at least it got the county and the city on the same page.

The exemptions in the county's smoking ordinance had expired 11 days earlier, while similar exemptions in the city's smoking ban did not expire. Making the separate ordinances align with each other was a step Tornatta said was necessary before the city and county could achieve a uniform, comprehensive ban.

"What troubles me most about that situation is all the time and effort that was spent trying to make the two work in conjunction with each other, when there's so many problems we need to be dealing with," said Rebecca Kasha, chairwoman of the reorganization committee and an attorney. "But because of the governmental setup we have, it was necessary.

"If we were one entity, we would have moved forward with, I assume, greater speed and a lot clearer message about what we're really trying to accomplish. That was a perfect example of not moving forward with one vision and one voice."

Attorney Mike Schopmeyer, local counsel to the committee, said a newly consolidated government could find it a challenging and time-consuming task to integrate city and county codes and ordinances while trying to account for areas of law not addressed in the codes.

Similar ordinances in the city and county probably would result in the city's version prevailing, Schopmeyer said, but a county ordinance would be assimilated into the new government if the city had no corresponding ordinance and vice versa.

"The city is bigger and it provides more services, so the breadth of the city's law is broader than the county's," he said.

"There's some, but not as much, in the county code dealing with sewers, for example, because the sewer system is provided by the city of Evansville utility. And there may not be that many laws that overlap. For example, in land-use planning we have a fairly unified code."

Schopmeyer said the reorganization committee could recommend a multiyear "sunsetting" period, after which codes and ordinances deemed no longer relevant or necessary would be allowed to lapse. The procedure has been used by legislatures and other consolidating governments to reorganize codebooks.

If a city or county ordinance is sunsetted after a period of years during which it is not needed, but then something happens that creates a need for it, the new consolidated government would not be constrained, Schopmeyer said.

"In year six, bingo, something comes up, and people say, 'Oh my god, we had laws for that before,'" he said. "Well, (the new consolidated government's Common Council) can easily re-enact it."

Living through it

Consolidating government is hard to do, Jo Anne Smith says.

Smith should know. The Evansville-Vanderburgh County Central Dispatch director now presides over one of 12 local government agencies that already have consolidated — and she was there to see it happen.

By the time the city and the county reached an agreement in late 1988 to establish a joint dispatching operation, Smith had been working as an Evansville Police Department dispatcher for 10 years.

What she saw when she began her career as a police telephone operator in 1977 was anything but unified.

"You had city police dispatchers — firefighters and civilians — dispatching police officers and taking all 911 calls from the first floor of the Civic Center, and then on the second floor you had civilians and police officers working as Evansville Fire Department dispatchers dispatching city firetrucks and ambulances that the city had," she said.

And the Vanderburgh County Sheriff's Office?

"Their dispatchers were deputies dispatching deputies and suburban fire departments," Smith said with a smile.

But when a merger agreement finally was signed after nine years of discussions, resistance flourished.

Dispatchers struggled to learn the codes, signals and other fine points of dispatching officers from other departments — and Smith recalls that some of them didn't want to.

"The codes and signals they had been using were the way it had always been, and that's the way some of them wanted it to always be," she said.

Cross-training each other at the Sheriff's Office and Police Department throughout 1989 and 1990, the dispatchers also had to adjust to working in the same space for the first time — not to mention a new $2.8 million radio system that operated at 800 megahertz.

Perhaps most troublesome, deputies, police officers and firefighters were wary of dispatchers they hadn't worked with. Sometimes, they openly challenged unfamiliar dispatchers.

"The mindset was, a deputy dispatching a deputy would know exactly what that deputy would need out in the field," Smith said. "The city police officers preferred civilian dispatchers because there was a closeness that had developed between us."

But a funny thing happened as the assorted dispatchers and officers continued to cross-train and work together.

The parochialism melted away, giving way over time to a new sort of camaraderie and cohesiveness.

Smith says she knew the consolidation was working on the terrible day in 1992 when a Kentucky National Guard C-130 transport plane crashed into the Drury Inn at U.S. 41 and Lynch Road and a nearby Jojo's Restaurant. Sixteen people were killed.

The new radio system had multiple talk groups that allowed dispatchers to send police, fire and sheriff's officers on separate daily calls while still responding to the tragedy.

Smith contrasts that with Dec. 13, 1977, the day a plane carrying the University of Evansville basketball team crashed, killing all aboard. On that day, now-obsolete radio equipment and poor organization constrained dispatchers.

"You had your three separate agencies," she said. "You had your police dispatcher who could do nothing but talk to the people from the Police Department that were on the scene of the crash.

"Everybody was involved, not just police, but we weren't connected to each other. We were not in the same room, and if we had to relay information, somebody had to pick up a phone and call them."

Now dispatchers don't have to work separately or while being forced together, Smith said.

"We have everything operating in the same room, so if you call 911, we don't have to connect you to anything unless you want an ambulance, then we connect you to (American Medical Response, a contracted private service)," she said.

"It was a long struggle to get to where we are today. But it's a much more efficient way to take care of public safety communications. I think we're a success story here."

Borrowing power

The city and the county each have constitutional general obligation bonding capacity equal to 2 percent of one-third of assessed valuation, excluding lease payments. Several special district taxing units have the same debt limitation for bonds paid off with interest by taxes collected from property owners.

A consolidated government likely would have less borrowing power as a single entity than the city and the county would have as separate units, said Tom Guevara, project manager for Indianapolis-based public accounting and consulting firm Crowe Horwath.

The firm is contracted to serve as financial advisers to the reorganization committee.

The essential fact to remember, Guevara said, is that the city's $7.4 billion gross assessed valuation is included in the county's $12.1 billion gross assessed valuation.

"Each taxing unit now has its own ability to bond," he said. "If you consolidate by creating one unit of government where there were two, effectively what you would be doing is getting rid of one taxing unit.

"Whereas before, the city had its own bonding capacity and its own ability to issue bonds based on its assessed valuation, keep in mind that the county also has its own ability to issue bonds based on its assessed valuation, and its assessed valuation overlaps with the city. You get rid of that overlap that creates that extra bonding power."

Guevara stressed that a newly consolidated government would still be subject to all public and legislative approval processes, such as petition remonstrance and referendums, necessary to issue bonds secured by property taxes and to incur debt.

Barring substantial changes to assessed valuation and total property tax levies, Guevara said, he sees no reason to believe a consolidated government's revenue losses as a result of state-mandated property tax caps would be substantially different from the city and the county's losses combined.

Reorganization committee members have said taxes for residents outside the city should not go up to cover debt service on city projects such as bonds funding Downtown parking garages.

The 2006 legislation that creates a framework for local governments to merge contains a provision stating that debt obligations incurred by a political subdivision — the city or the county — before consolidation may not be imposed on taxpayers who were not previously responsible for the indebtedness.

Likewise, pension obligations existing on the effective date of consolidation "must be paid by the taxpayers that were responsible for payment of the pension obligations before the reorganization."

Federal income

The city of Evansville receives millions of dollars every year in annual population-based federal allocations and competitive and discretionary federal grants. The total, which varies from year to year, rose from $11.1 million in 2006 to $15.7 million in 2007 and $17.1 million in 2008, the latest year for which figures are available.

Reorganizing a consolidated government as a city, as the reorganization committee's lawyers recommend, would increase the new entity's population, arguably making it more attractive to businesses looking for populations with buying power and large work forces.

But there are questions about how population-based federal funding formulas would interpret the numbers and whether it would mean more money.

Tom Barnett, director of the Department of Metropolitan Development, pointed to the city's annual entitlement allocations of Community Development Block Grant money.

The money, intended for housing projects for low-to-moderate income persons, is typically the city's largest single federal allocation. It amounted to more than $3.2 million this year.

Barnett pointed to a block grant funding formula that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's website says heavily weighs "the extent of poverty, population, housing overcrowding, age of housing and population growth lag in relationship to other metropolitan areas."

Consolidating government doesn't increase poverty, Barnett said.

In fact, adding what likely would be thousands of non-low-to-moderate income housing units outside the city to the funding formula likely would reduce block grant allocations.

"Most of these funds are geared toward populations that have issues, low-to-moderate income," Barnett said. "The areas of need, where you have housing problems — you probably don't have that out by the greenfield population surrounding the city limits as much (as in the city).

"So while consolidation increases our population, it might mean, for example, instead of having one in 10 houses in the city that was low-to-moderate income, you might be down to one in 11.

"That doesn't help you, that hurts you in the calculations," he said.

Vanderburgh County's estimated population in 2009, the latest year an estimate is available, was 175,434. Of that number, 116,584 are estimated to be in the city.

But Greg Harper, a Census Bureau demographer, said consolidation wouldn't mean that number would automatically transfer to the new entity.

Harper said the population of Darmstadt, estimated at 1,500, would be excluded from the new consolidated entity's population because Darmstadt decided not to participate in any consolidation effort.

Darmstadt is Vanderburgh County's only incorporated town and a one-time hotbed of opposition to government merger.

Barnett may not have answers about certain funding formulas, but he has no such doubts about the economic development benefits of increasing population.

"There are big companies looking to relocate or expand their business or go into a market, and they don't ever look at Evansville because we're not big enough compared to whatever it is they're looking for," he said.

"The more people you have, generally the better it is for people to take a look at you."

Indianapolis-based Bowen Engineering Corp., Weinzapfel said, "was planning to build out in the county, but they, too, saw the advantages of working in partnership with the city and locating their new Evansville offices Downtown."

What Weinzapfel did not say during that Oct. 24, 2006, speech to the Chamber of Commerce of Southwest Indiana was that a year earlier, Bowen Engineering had gotten from the City Council what it could not get from the County Council — a 10-year property tax phase-in.

Such direct city-county competition for economic development isn't unheard of, said Greg Wathen, president of the Economic Development Coalition of Southwest Indiana.

"I'd rather not talk about specific projects, but sure, it happens," Wathen said. "Even though, in essence, we're one county, competing with ourselves for the same project. ... It happens less since the coalition was formed (in 2006)."

The competition, which can drive up the costs to local taxpayers, wouldn't happen at all if Vanderburgh County had one local government instead of two, say advocates of city-county consolidation.

It is one in a wide range of financial, political, legislative and structural issues the Evansville-Vanderburgh County Reorganization Committee must grapple with as it carries out its charge to craft a proposal for consolidation.

The 12-member citizens committee was formed in February as part of the consolidation campaign triggered by a petition signature drive led by the League of Women Voters of Southwestern Indiana. After taking July off, the committee will resume meeting Thursday.

Pointing to successes of other merged governments, supporters long have argued consolidation is first and foremost a way to spark economic development, with its attendant boosts to jobs, tax base and population.

Insufficiently impressed by Bowen Engineering's promise of 22 new jobs within five years and a $1 million investment to replace its East Side office by building at Daylight Industrial Park, the County Council approved in July 2005 a phase-in of just five years.

Bowen Engineering officials immediately began exploring alternative sites within the city limits.

Within six weeks the company announced plans to purchase and renovate the old Harding Shymanski building at 233 SE Third St. A month after that, the City Council passed a preliminary resolution for a 10-year tax phase-in — this time for an estimated $666,000 in improvements to the building.

"Our total investment to be Downtown still was $1 million, both in the purchase of the property and the improvements to the building," Jeff Purdue, Bowen Engineering's senior vice president and division manager, said recently.

"It was very obvious the mayor and City Council were quote, unquote, 'open for business.' They were very accommodating and encouraging and inviting."

County Councilman Joe Kiefer, who helped kick off the consolidation drive of 2005 by pushing for it as a member of the City Council, says more economic development ultimately would reduce taxes.

"If you have more people paying into the system — new businesses, new growth in the area — it's ultimately going to lower the tax base as far as what people are saying," Kiefer said in June on "Newsmakers," a weekly public-affairs television program co-produced by WNIN-PBS9 and the Courier & Press.

Few would argue that more growth is desirable. When voters rejected the VandiGov proposal for consolidation in 1974, the county's population was 167,678. The estimated population in 2009, the latest year a figure is available from the U.S. Census Bureau, was 175,434.

Working with the county's abundance of greenfield space and the city's larger supply of existing structures, economic development professionals say they are obliged to at least listen when comparisons to other communities are made.

But arguments in favor of consolidation must be tested against the mix of local ordinances, state statutes, history and personalities that color Evansville and Vanderburgh County's collective political climate.

Within Indiana's third-largest city in population and its eighth-smallest county in area, what is the need?

Debating the layers

While most of the debate about consolidation focuses on the merits of two layers or one layer of government, in economic development there are several layers.

Prospective and expanding businesses don't rule out Evansville or Vanderburgh County in televised sessions of the County Council or the City Council, consolidation advocates say.

They do it when far fewer people are watching, sometimes in meetings held Monday mornings in a Civic Center conference room.

Evan Beck, owner and president of Woodward Commercial Realty Inc. and Woodward Development and Construction Inc., said businesses can be intimidated by the need to secure permits and approvals from multiple local government agencies.

"When you go into a project, you may be dealing with a number of agencies, whether it's Area Plan Commission, city or county council, the Board of Zoning Appeals, permitting, anything dealing with utilities, whether it's city water, sewer," said Beck, chairman of the board of the Chamber of Commerce of Southwest Indiana.

"It goes on and on and on, all the different things you have to accomplish and get completed before you actually start a project."

Beck mentioned as an example commercial-site review meetings, at which business representatives discuss permitting requirements with city and county department heads and other officials. The meetings are held Mondays at 9:30 a.m.

"It's not just the Area Plan Commission sitting at the table," he said. "You've got your surveyor, your city or county engineer, all these different people sitting around, and they all report to a lot of different people above them. That sometimes becomes complicated, where there's no kind of unified approach to that part of it."

With local government consolidation, Beck said, "you'd have fewer people reporting to fewer bosses."

Beck said the Area Plan Commission and Wathen's group have made the process more bearable for businesses by running interference for them, but it is still more work than it would be under consolidation.

But Brad Mills, director of the Area Plan Commission, said consolidation likely would change little about the commercial-site review process, which involves several local government agencies that consolidated years ago.

"As I understand the consolidation, we're still going to have the Area Plan Commission, we're still going to have the Water & Sewer Department, we're still going to have the Building Commission, we're still going to have an engineer, whether you have to go to the city engineer or the county engineer," he said.

"You don't go to both city engineer and county engineer at this time. If (a project is) in the city, you go to the city; if it's in the county, you go to the county. I mean, I don't think we're going to eliminate the county surveyor."

Businesses may need a variance for a project, Mills said, but that wouldn't change under consolidation either.

"I don't know that we're going to eliminate all of our requirements by consolidating our government," he said.

Duplication

There are other layers in other places.

Wathen pointed out that state law typically requires the approval of both the County Council, the fiscal body, and the County Commissioners, the executive governing body, to use Tax Increment Financing to support an economic development project outside the city.

"What if you get permission from the commissioners and you don't get permission from the council?" he said. "Because, say, they're different political parties or maybe somebody's upset at someone else or whatever?

"If you go through consolidation, whatever your governing body is, you're going to go to one body. You don't escape seeking the county's permission, but what you're doing is you're removing layers of bureaucracy."

Tax Increment Financing districts allow local government to set aside a certain portion of the property taxes collected within an area and use the money to pay for projects in that area.

Kiefer points to the simultaneous existence of the Evansville Economic Development Commission and the Vanderburgh County Economic Development Commission, bodies created by statute whose members work on behalf of the city and the county, respectively.

The separate commissions meet periodically, in most cases to approve financing of an economic development project by issuing bonds. Reorganization committee members haven't decided how to propose the two bodies merge or even whether they could.

Kiefer said economic development professionals have to accept that some missed opportunities never reveal themselves.

"Who knows how many businesses never gave us consideration? ... Where we might have had an advantage if we would have had a merged city-county government," he said.

Taxation without representation

In some instances, residents of Vanderburgh County are paying fees and taxes set by elected officials for whom they cannot vote — or individuals appointed by those officials.

When the public learned last year that a group of city and county elected officials decided in 2008 not to renew a local homestead credit that amounted to more than $5.1 million for the county's home-owners that year, County Council members explained they could not have reversed the decision.

That's because the City Council holds more than 70 percent of the votes on the county income tax council, a panel to which state law gives responsibility for local homestead credits. But that body, officially composed of City Council, County Council and Darmstadt Town Council members, did not meet.

In July, City Council members voted to raise rates charged for sewer services while saying they may postpone further increases until a rate study can justify the practice of charging a higher fee to residents who live outside the city's boundaries.

The rate increase is intended primarily to fund work on projects to stop flooding that damages homes and businesses on the city's Southeast Side during heavy storms.

But the 11,348 residents outside the city who receive Evansville sewer services — 40,029 residents in the city are sewer customers — may not register their agreement or disagreement by voting in City Council elections.

They also may not vote for the five-member Evansville Water & Sewer Board that recommended the increase in conjunction with officials of the utility, or the elected official who appointed the board members. That would be Weinzapfel.

The city's nearly 19,000 water customers who live outside city limits don't pay more than customers in the city, but county-only residents who receive city sewer services pay 35 percent higher rates.

The higher rates were passed in June 2002, with City Council members citing the greater distances that county-only residents' sewage had to be pumped.

In a June 10, 2002, presentation to the City Council, then-Mayor Russ Lloyd Jr. called for a rate structure in which "everybody pays their fair share and subsidies are removed."

"It should not be a surprise that it costs more to provide sewer service to county users than it does to city," Lloyd said then. "Serving a county user requires more sewer pipe and pumps to transport the sewage because they are farther away from the treatment plants."

Because the Evansville Water & Sewer Utility's $57 million budget is entirely funded by water and sewer rate payments, sewer customers who live outside the city arguably help fund everything the city department does.

Jim Garrard, interim director of the Water & Sewer Utility, said that can be justified.

"The infrastructure — the pipes, both in and out of the city, the wastewater treatment plants, which are large investments — are city-owned assets, and we're responsible for insuring them, maintaining them, making sure we run them properly," Garrard said.

"Therefore, the city people that operate this should be overseen by mayoral appointments and (City Council members) who have the full picture of not just water and sewer operations, but the entire city government operation. The people who make decisions about rates, whether they're in or out of city, should be the city leaders who are elected to run the system."

Not surprisingly, Jim Salmon does not agree.

Salmon, an Old State Road resident who has opposed the past three sewer rate increases, lives just north of the city limits.

"I don't think I'm comfortable with that," Salmon said. "It's sort of like taxation without representation, as far as I'm concerned."

Executive leadership

In the days after a deadly F-3 tornado killed 18 people at Eastbrook Mobile Home Park on Nov. 6, 2005, Cheryl Musgrave had not a moment to spare to ponder the structure of county government in Indiana.

But she recalls wondering on the morning of Nov. 14 why the County Commissioners, of which she was then president, had to convene a special meeting to pass a series of motions accepting offers of assistance in the clean up.

Stopping only to hear reports from officials who were helping formulate county government's response to the tragedy, Musgrave and Commissioners Tom Shetler Jr. and Bill Nix moved quickly, passing five motions in 19 minutes.

Musgrave, who left the commissioners in 2007 to become head of the Indiana Department of Local Government Finance, shakes her head at the memory.

"We had to hold a special meeting (of the three-member executive governing body) to take official action to deal with an emergency situation," she said. "The mayor never has to do that. The governor never has to do that. The president never has to do that.

"There could be no unified executive leadership, as there could have been if we'd had a mayor."

Volumes have been written about what critics call Indiana's antiquated local government structure, but the central fact is that it still provides simultaneously for three-member executive governing bodies to run county governments and a single chief executive to lead cities.

The reorganization committee envisions a consolidated government headed by a mayor and an 11-member Common Council that would assume all the legislative and fiscal functions now carried out by the City Council and County Council.

Musgrave, who said she would welcome such a streamlined governmental structure, wonders what could have happened if differences among the commissioners over the county's response to the tornado had hindered a unified response to the tragedy.

"It could have been bad and totally unnecessary," she said.

In 2007, philosophical differences among the County Commissioners did force the county to delete $1.1 million for two projects from a federal funding request.

Musgrave and Nix wanted $1 million to help build a 2.5-mile bicycle and running path linking Burdette Park to the University of Southern Indiana and $100,000 for an emergency telephone notification system. But Commissioner Troy Tornatta, who said he supported the Burdette Park-USI project, disagreed with Musgrave and Nix's strategy for funding it.

In the month before Tornatta took office, the commissioners awarded a $416,391 contract for the $2.5 million bike path's first phase. Musgrave and Nix used riverboat money to pay for it, with no funding guarantees beyond that.

Tornatta said the commissioners should have waited until they had the entire $2.5 million in place instead of building the path in phases.

The commissioners had sent a funding request to Indiana's U.S. senators and Rep. Brad Ellsworth, D-Ind., that was signed only by Musgrave and Nix.

Weeks later they had to send a new letter to Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., this time with Tornatta's signature — but with no mention of the Burdette Park-USI project or the emergency telephone notification system.

"(Lugar's office and Senate Appropriations Committee staffers) said a letter signed by all three commissioners would stand a better chance of success," Musgrave said at the time. A Lugar spokesman confirmed that account.

To this day, the incident rankles Musgrave.

"I told (Lugar's staff), 'You're going to let the Democrat minority member stall this?'" she said.

But Tornatta won his seat on the commissioners in 2006 by saying the all-Republican body was marching in lockstep with no dissent. He pledged to be a watchdog on the three-member body.

Just as VandiGov opponents did back in 1974, County Councilman James Raben argues there is value in having more, rather than fewer, elected representatives.

"Obviously, if it's one person to answer for everybody, they're going to get pulled in a lot of different directions," said Raben, who estimates 70 percent of his western Vanderburgh County district is outside the city.

"My big concern has been that the county residents are the ones who are going to lose all the representation (in consolidation) because they have three commissioners and they have seven council people to go to for whatever their concerns are."

Raben said he isn't against consolidating portions of city and county government — but the level of elected representation isn't the problem.

"Keep it as it is," he said.

Differing ordinances

When Democrats used their brand-new majority status on the County Commissioners in January 2009 to reinstate exemptions for bars, taverns and nightclubs in the county's smoking ban, supporters of tough anti-smoking measures were infuriated.

But at least it got the county and the city on the same page.

The exemptions in the county's smoking ordinance had expired 11 days earlier, while similar exemptions in the city's smoking ban did not expire. Making the separate ordinances align with each other was a step Tornatta said was necessary before the city and county could achieve a uniform, comprehensive ban.

"What troubles me most about that situation is all the time and effort that was spent trying to make the two work in conjunction with each other, when there's so many problems we need to be dealing with," said Rebecca Kasha, chairwoman of the reorganization committee and an attorney. "But because of the governmental setup we have, it was necessary.

"If we were one entity, we would have moved forward with, I assume, greater speed and a lot clearer message about what we're really trying to accomplish. That was a perfect example of not moving forward with one vision and one voice."

Attorney Mike Schopmeyer, local counsel to the committee, said a newly consolidated government could find it a challenging and time-consuming task to integrate city and county codes and ordinances while trying to account for areas of law not addressed in the codes.

Similar ordinances in the city and county probably would result in the city's version prevailing, Schopmeyer said, but a county ordinance would be assimilated into the new government if the city had no corresponding ordinance and vice versa.

"The city is bigger and it provides more services, so the breadth of the city's law is broader than the county's," he said.

"There's some, but not as much, in the county code dealing with sewers, for example, because the sewer system is provided by the city of Evansville utility. And there may not be that many laws that overlap. For example, in land-use planning we have a fairly unified code."

Schopmeyer said the reorganization committee could recommend a multiyear "sunsetting" period, after which codes and ordinances deemed no longer relevant or necessary would be allowed to lapse. The procedure has been used by legislatures and other consolidating governments to reorganize codebooks.

If a city or county ordinance is sunsetted after a period of years during which it is not needed, but then something happens that creates a need for it, the new consolidated government would not be constrained, Schopmeyer said.

"In year six, bingo, something comes up, and people say, 'Oh my god, we had laws for that before,'" he said. "Well, (the new consolidated government's Common Council) can easily re-enact it."

Living through it

Consolidating government is hard to do, Jo Anne Smith says.

Smith should know. The Evansville-Vanderburgh County Central Dispatch director now presides over one of 12 local government agencies that already have consolidated — and she was there to see it happen.

By the time the city and the county reached an agreement in late 1988 to establish a joint dispatching operation, Smith had been working as an Evansville Police Department dispatcher for 10 years.

What she saw when she began her career as a police telephone operator in 1977 was anything but unified.

"You had city police dispatchers — firefighters and civilians — dispatching police officers and taking all 911 calls from the first floor of the Civic Center, and then on the second floor you had civilians and police officers working as Evansville Fire Department dispatchers dispatching city firetrucks and ambulances that the city had," she said.

And the Vanderburgh County Sheriff's Office?

"Their dispatchers were deputies dispatching deputies and suburban fire departments," Smith said with a smile.

But when a merger agreement finally was signed after nine years of discussions, resistance flourished.

Dispatchers struggled to learn the codes, signals and other fine points of dispatching officers from other departments — and Smith recalls that some of them didn't want to.

"The codes and signals they had been using were the way it had always been, and that's the way some of them wanted it to always be," she said.

Cross-training each other at the Sheriff's Office and Police Department throughout 1989 and 1990, the dispatchers also had to adjust to working in the same space for the first time — not to mention a new $2.8 million radio system that operated at 800 megahertz.

Perhaps most troublesome, deputies, police officers and firefighters were wary of dispatchers they hadn't worked with. Sometimes, they openly challenged unfamiliar dispatchers.

"The mindset was, a deputy dispatching a deputy would know exactly what that deputy would need out in the field," Smith said. "The city police officers preferred civilian dispatchers because there was a closeness that had developed between us."

But a funny thing happened as the assorted dispatchers and officers continued to cross-train and work together.

The parochialism melted away, giving way over time to a new sort of camaraderie and cohesiveness.

Smith says she knew the consolidation was working on the terrible day in 1992 when a Kentucky National Guard C-130 transport plane crashed into the Drury Inn at U.S. 41 and Lynch Road and a nearby Jojo's Restaurant. Sixteen people were killed.

The new radio system had multiple talk groups that allowed dispatchers to send police, fire and sheriff's officers on separate daily calls while still responding to the tragedy.

Smith contrasts that with Dec. 13, 1977, the day a plane carrying the University of Evansville basketball team crashed, killing all aboard. On that day, now-obsolete radio equipment and poor organization constrained dispatchers.

"You had your three separate agencies," she said. "You had your police dispatcher who could do nothing but talk to the people from the Police Department that were on the scene of the crash.

"Everybody was involved, not just police, but we weren't connected to each other. We were not in the same room, and if we had to relay information, somebody had to pick up a phone and call them."

Now dispatchers don't have to work separately or while being forced together, Smith said.

"We have everything operating in the same room, so if you call 911, we don't have to connect you to anything unless you want an ambulance, then we connect you to (American Medical Response, a contracted private service)," she said.

"It was a long struggle to get to where we are today. But it's a much more efficient way to take care of public safety communications. I think we're a success story here."

Borrowing power

The city and the county each have constitutional general obligation bonding capacity equal to 2 percent of one-third of assessed valuation, excluding lease payments. Several special district taxing units have the same debt limitation for bonds paid off with interest by taxes collected from property owners.

A consolidated government likely would have less borrowing power as a single entity than the city and the county would have as separate units, said Tom Guevara, project manager for Indianapolis-based public accounting and consulting firm Crowe Horwath.

The firm is contracted to serve as financial advisers to the reorganization committee.

The essential fact to remember, Guevara said, is that the city's $7.4 billion gross assessed valuation is included in the county's $12.1 billion gross assessed valuation.

"Each taxing unit now has its own ability to bond," he said. "If you consolidate by creating one unit of government where there were two, effectively what you would be doing is getting rid of one taxing unit.

"Whereas before, the city had its own bonding capacity and its own ability to issue bonds based on its assessed valuation, keep in mind that the county also has its own ability to issue bonds based on its assessed valuation, and its assessed valuation overlaps with the city. You get rid of that overlap that creates that extra bonding power."

Guevara stressed that a newly consolidated government would still be subject to all public and legislative approval processes, such as petition remonstrance and referendums, necessary to issue bonds secured by property taxes and to incur debt.

Barring substantial changes to assessed valuation and total property tax levies, Guevara said, he sees no reason to believe a consolidated government's revenue losses as a result of state-mandated property tax caps would be substantially different from the city and the county's losses combined.

Reorganization committee members have said taxes for residents outside the city should not go up to cover debt service on city projects such as bonds funding Downtown parking garages.

The 2006 legislation that creates a framework for local governments to merge contains a provision stating that debt obligations incurred by a political subdivision — the city or the county — before consolidation may not be imposed on taxpayers who were not previously responsible for the indebtedness.

Likewise, pension obligations existing on the effective date of consolidation "must be paid by the taxpayers that were responsible for payment of the pension obligations before the reorganization."

Federal income

The city of Evansville receives millions of dollars every year in annual population-based federal allocations and competitive and discretionary federal grants. The total, which varies from year to year, rose from $11.1 million in 2006 to $15.7 million in 2007 and $17.1 million in 2008, the latest year for which figures are available.

Reorganizing a consolidated government as a city, as the reorganization committee's lawyers recommend, would increase the new entity's population, arguably making it more attractive to businesses looking for populations with buying power and large work forces.

But there are questions about how population-based federal funding formulas would interpret the numbers and whether it would mean more money.

Tom Barnett, director of the Department of Metropolitan Development, pointed to the city's annual entitlement allocations of Community Development Block Grant money.

The money, intended for housing projects for low-to-moderate income persons, is typically the city's largest single federal allocation. It amounted to more than $3.2 million this year.

Barnett pointed to a block grant funding formula that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's website says heavily weighs "the extent of poverty, population, housing overcrowding, age of housing and population growth lag in relationship to other metropolitan areas."

Consolidating government doesn't increase poverty, Barnett said.

In fact, adding what likely would be thousands of non-low-to-moderate income housing units outside the city to the funding formula likely would reduce block grant allocations.

"Most of these funds are geared toward populations that have issues, low-to-moderate income," Barnett said. "The areas of need, where you have housing problems — you probably don't have that out by the greenfield population surrounding the city limits as much (as in the city).

"So while consolidation increases our population, it might mean, for example, instead of having one in 10 houses in the city that was low-to-moderate income, you might be down to one in 11.

"That doesn't help you, that hurts you in the calculations," he said.

Vanderburgh County's estimated population in 2009, the latest year an estimate is available, was 175,434. Of that number, 116,584 are estimated to be in the city.

But Greg Harper, a Census Bureau demographer, said consolidation wouldn't mean that number would automatically transfer to the new entity.

Harper said the population of Darmstadt, estimated at 1,500, would be excluded from the new consolidated entity's population because Darmstadt decided not to participate in any consolidation effort.

Darmstadt is Vanderburgh County's only incorporated town and a one-time hotbed of opposition to government merger.

Barnett may not have answers about certain funding formulas, but he has no such doubts about the economic development benefits of increasing population.

"There are big companies looking to relocate or expand their business or go into a market, and they don't ever look at Evansville because we're not big enough compared to whatever it is they're looking for," he said.

"The more people you have, generally the better it is for people to take a look at you."