EVANSVILLE —Vanderburgh County Commissioners have taken one of the final steps needed to place a question on merging city and county governments before for the voters next year.
During their meeting Tuesday night, Commissioners Marsha Abell and Lloyd Winnecke supported the resolution which enables a referendum in November 2012, while Commissioner Stephen Melcher voted against it.
Now for the plan officials have spent the last five months discussing to get onto the ballot, the Evansville City Council must approve the exact same resolution as the commissioners. The City Council is scheduled to vote on the proposal Sept. 26.
Melcher's lone dissenting vote came as no surprise after his own proposal adding a so-called voter threshold died without a vote after neither Abell or Winnekce seconded it. Under a threshold, city voters and those who live outside city limits would have had to give separate majority approval for the two governments to merge. The proposal being considered requires a simple countywide majority from voters at the polls for the new government structure to take effect in January 2015.
Melcher has pledged since April that he would not support sending any plan to a referendum without a threshold after hearing from a small group of Vanderburgh County residents who live outside city limits who continue to rally for it despite legal advice that the entire reorganization process would be forced to start over if officials decided to include it. Before the task of crafting an initial merger plan for members of the Commissioners and the Evansville City Council was given to a 12-member citizen committee, both bodies unanimously chose not to include a threshold last year.
Melcher said he believes that first vote was rushed and that decision on how the referendum should is conducted should be decided by the committee and local officials at the same time as the rest of the proposal instead of locking it in at the very start. While he said opposed the resolution for this proposal because he didn't believe it should be passed a without a threshold, he believes the voters should get the chance to decide the issue. But he maintained that the language could have been included even if the process needed to start over.
"There was time to get it done, and get it on the ballot," he said.
Abell noted that she was not a Commissioner when officials decided how the vote would be conducted and said her top belief is that there should be some sort of referendum on the proposal that members of the City Council and Commissioners spent so long drafting. Referencing some the anger that of some of the opponents of a potential merger have against the construction of the Ford Center, she said the voters deserve to have their say on the issue, and that she believed adding a rejection threshold at this point endangers that.
"The complaints regarding the arena by not having a referendum have been well heard," Abell said. "We're going to have a referendum on this issue, and I vote yes,"
Winnecke who has publicly supported the effort to merge the two governments, did not explain his vote during the meeting.
City Council members and the County Commissioners have held multiple joint meetings since March to make more than 100 modifications to the plan put forth by the citizen committee before getting to the brink of a referendum. The goal of all of the joint meetings was so that officials come to an agreement on a proposal that officials felt comfortable passing to the voters.
But even if the City Council fails to pass the needed identical resolution, the issue could still eventually go to a referendum if about 5,000 of the county's voters — 10 percent of the number of those who voted in last year's secretary of state race — sign a petition asking for it to appear on the ballot.