Gov. Mitch Daniels, Post-Tribune guest columnist
It's an unfortunate irony that Indiana, with our well-deserved reputation for keeping government lean and accountable, is awash in elected officials and layers of local administration.
And while our state government has gone recently from nowhere to national leadership when it comes to innovation, its local counterparts remain virtually unchanged since the pioneers arrived.
For example, our poor relief and fire protection systems, administered just as they were when created in 1848, are contemporaries of the California Gold Rush and Irish Potato Famine.
A time traveler from the horse-and-buggy era would be confounded by iPads and iPhones but instantly would recognize how we run our townships.
This would all be amusing if it did not come at such a steep cost to both Hoosiers' incomes and the quality of their government.
Because of this, local government reform has been discussed for decades. But other than an attempt by Gov. Paul V. McNutt some 75 years ago, it's been all talk and little action.
That's why, in 2007, I asked a bipartisanship group led by former Gov. Joe Kernan and Chief Justice Randall Shepard to help us find a way forward. They did a great job.
They presented to us a blueprint to bring Indiana local government out of the 19th century and into the 21st, and a convincing body of research to back up their proposals. Seven of their 27 recommendations have been tackled, but the most important have yet to be dealt with. That must happen now.
This year I am asking the General Assembly to work on four additional reforms.
Across Indiana, government employees simultaneously sit on city or county councils, interrogate their own supervisors and decide their own salaries. Illustrative examples, to name a few, can be seen in Lake County, where a city council member introduced and voted a pay raise for himself, and in Tipton and Boone counties where officials were awarded mowing and snow plowing contracts. It's time to end this double dipping and the direct conflict of interest it creates.
The same goes for the nepotism that leads to one in four township employees sharing a last name with the politician who hired them, and millions of dollars of township salary going to workers with family ties to the trustee.
Next, we need to remove the antiquated system that allows more than 4,000 politicians, few of them known to the voters they represent, to run thousands of different township governments while sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars in reserves. Some have as much as eight years of spending needs stashed in the bank, yet they keep collecting taxes while the neighboring township does not even have enough money to provide poor relief to its needy citizens.
Those serving in township government are good people and well-motivated. We thank them for their service, but we ought to remove this venerable but obsolete layer of government, and assign what remains of its duty to elected county officials.
Our strange arrangement of a three-headed county executive should also change. No business has three CEOs; no football team has three head coaches; no military unit would think of having three co-equal commanding officers. Citizens tell me all the time of their frustration trying to figure out which commissioner to approach about a problem, or about each of the three blaming the other two for a failure to deal with a community need. We should join the rest of America in moving to a single, elected county commissioner, working with a strengthened legislative branch, the county council, to make decision-making accountable and implementation swift and efficient.
These steps, taken together, will save millions of dollars for our hard-pressed local governments and streamline a system that simply has too many politicians, too many layers, too many taxing units, and produces too little accountability and too few results.
In recent years we've made major progress in bringing about much-needed reform. Now, as then, there is plenty of room for creative compromise or alternative approaches.
The only unacceptable outcome is no action at all.
It's time to give Hoosiers a government built for the Internet Age, not frontier days. Let's get to work; Indiana is waiting.