For the first time since 1974, Vanderburgh County voters living inside and outside the city will have a vote on whether to consolidate city and county governments.
This past Monday, the City Council voted 8-1 in favor of allowing citizens to have a referendum on the merger question. Two weeks earlier, the County Commissioners voted 2-1 in favor of the same resolution. Those two affirmative actions on the same consolidation measure combined to meet the conditions of state law for a merger referendum. As a result, the consolidation question will be on the ballot in November 2012.
If approved, it would create a single, countywide government. The executive branch would be headed by a mayor and the county commissioners would be eliminated. The nine-member City Council and the seven-member County Council would be replaced by a 15-member common council. Some other city and county departments would be combined or eliminated, but the county sheriff's office and the city police department would not be combined. Rather, the referendum provides that the question could be taken up in 10 years, if consolidation is approved next year.
We would expect that between now and next fall that both supporters and opponents of the consolidation proposal will mount public education campaigns. The last time Vanderburgh County voters considered such a referendum nearly 37 years ago, the proposal to consolidate was defeated soundly, by a 3-1 margin.
There are lessons to be gleaned from that heated campaign, lessons that might serve both opponents and supporters of consolidation in conducting their campaigns.
The key lesson would be for neither of the sides to take anything for granted. Supporters of Vandigov were confident going into the 1974 campaign that voters would appreciate the reasonableness of their points in favor of consolidation. But voters, inside and outside the city, were not buying. Instead, supporters of consolidation got out-hustled by a rural-based group of county residents living outside the city.
They convinced not only their rural neighbors, but voters living inside the city that it was not in their best interests to consolidate the city and county.
It didn't help either that the nation was still reeling from the Watergate scandal at that time, and people were greatly distrustful of government..
Of course, much has changed since 1974. The city population has shrunk, just as the county suburbs outside the city limits have grown. The city has been left with fewer property owners to support with their taxes essentially the same amount of city services. Given that both public officials and citizens say they are looking for ways to reduce the size of local government, they should be able to see that we have two, duplicated layers of local government. Consolidation would bring with it the promise of streamlining government, while making the city more user-friendly for local and new business and industry.
This referendum presents a rare opportunity to the citizens of Evansville and Vanderburgh County to modernize their government. For now, our best advice to those citizens is keep an open mind. Pay attention to what the candidates have to say in this year's city election, and once that is over, let the campaigns for and against consolidation begin.