EVANSVILLE —The two major issues still facing local officials tasked with crafting a final government consolidation proposal remained unresolved after Thursday’s meeting between members of the Evansville city council and the Vanderburgh County Commissioners.
While both the potential new jurisdictional boundaries of the two law enforcement agencies under a merged Evansville-Vanderburgh County government and predictions of financial impact such a plan could have on current city and non-city residents were discussed, questions remain about both topics.
The two bodies must approve identical plans for their proposal to go to a referendum, possibly in November 2012. Because questions still remain, the meeting was not officially adjourned and will reconvene in less than two weeks.
Jennifer Hudson, of the accounting firm Crowe Horwarth, presented officials with a study that showed the new plan could potentially save city and non-city residents at least 2 percent on their property tax bills in 2015. That would be the first year of the new government if voters were to approve the consolidation proposal.
However, if current city residents no longer help pay for the law enforcement duties of the sheriff’s office because they would already be paying for protection from the former city police department, property tax rates for non-city residents could rise.
In two areas she studied — Center and Scott townships — property taxes could jump by more than 10 percent in the area under the sheriff’s jurisdiction. But residents who live in areas patrolled by Evansville police officers could see a tax savings of about 6 percent. Hudson said both scenarios assume that all residents support the corrections portion of the sheriff’s budget and don’t include the savings from eliminating of some public offices in the merger.
Some officials questioned Hudson’s two projected savings figures — she also included figures based on a 7 percent consolidated government budget savings — and asked for Hudson to come back with more specific numbers.
“(If) we’ve got something we can back this up with from other cities that have already done it I think that would give us a better understanding on where we are at because right now this would be hard to sell anybody,” Commissioner Stephen Melcher said.
Though the group stripped the immediate merger of the county’s two law enforcement agencies — the Vanderburgh County Sheriff’s Office and the Evansville Police Department — from the initial plan months ago, Police Chief Brad Hill and Sheriff Eric Williams have yet to agree how the new government would affect their jurisdictional boundaries.
Williams presented a plan that transfers large areas to or from his department that he told the committee would make law enforcement more efficient. Hill’s plan, which assistant chief Rob Hahn presented Thursday, leaves the boundaries largely the same as the current ones.
Councilman Dan Adams, D-at large, offered a third option during the meeting: placing the police department in a future urban services district that would mirror the current city limits.
Major discussion on law enforcement was put off until the next meeting, at 5:30 p.m. on Aug. 17 in Room 301 of the Civic Center.