Evansville Courier & Press
That the proposal to end township government in Indiana went down to defeat was no shock, although we had expected the fall to come much later in the session, when the government reform measure backed by Republican Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels reached the Indiana House.
There, House Speaker Pat Bauer, D-South Bend, had let it be known that this and other local government reform measures would get little consideration.
If proponents of this worthy bill had a chance, it was to first get it through the Indiana Senate, and then hope to fight it out in the House.
Instead, the township measure was gutted Wednesday in the Indiana Senate, where Daniels' Republican Party holds the majority. All that survived was a provision to prevent township officials from employing relatives and another to require county council review of township budgets.
Had the proposal been approved as written - and there is an outside chance it could still happen - it would have ended all township government offices not eliminated last session by the bill that targeted and took out most township assessors in Indiana.
This and other local government reform measures, recommended last year by the Kernan-Shepard Commission, are intended to downsize local government. As such, there is no better place to begin than with township government, which had a legitimate place in Hoosier life before the invention of the car and the computer. In the days of the horse and buggy, it made sense to have a nearby government office where citizens could do public business.
But no more. In an era when legitimate questions can be raised about whether we need both city and county governments, with oft overlapping services, we certainly do not need a third layer of local government.
In Vanderburgh and Warrick counties, voters demonstrated that they understood that in November referendums when they voted to eliminate township assessors in the largest townships. Assessors in the smaller townships were eliminated by legislation.
The voters may have understood, but apparently, a majority of Indiana senators did not understand. Or perhaps, too many of them were simply too close to friends in township offices.
The latter is about the only understandable - though not acceptable - reason why the Indiana Senate would not agree to this vehicle for reducing the size of local government.
Through political alliances, lawmakers are often close to local officials, including those in township offices. Thus, to support this legislation might have meant eliminating the job of a friend and ally.
On the other hand, gutting the bill meant loading taxpayers/voters down with unnecessary township government expenses.
Consider, that just recently, The Indianapolis Star reported that Indiana's 1,008 townships are sitting on $200 million in reserves, some 10 times more than their annual budgets. The Star reported that for some townships, the reserves amounted to hundreds of times more than their budgets.
What were the senators who voted to gut this bill thinking?