INDIANAPOLIS - Hoosier lawmakers have found some wisdom in the horse-and-buggy brand of government after all.
Townships are saved, county commissioners keep their jobs and small schools and libraries won't be forced to consolidate after legislation to overhaul the structure of down-home government in Indiana screeched to a halt last week in the Indiana House.
It marked a sudden end to this year's debate over whether streamlining and stripping away layers of local government would save money and improve services for taxpayers, or whether Indiana should keep a structure largely put in place in the state's 1851 constitution, when citizens needed government to be within a day's commute.
It was a debate that started when the drive to revamp local government arrived on the doorstep of this year's legislative session with sound and fury - the brainchild of an all-star blue-ribbon panel chaired by former Democratic Gov. Joe Kernan and Indiana Chief Justice Randall Shepard.
The reforms had the full-throated backing of Gov. Mitch Daniels, who invested the political capital of his landslide re-election bid in seeing the reforms through.
But those efforts smashed into a wall of bipartisan rejection in the Legislature. Republicans in the Senate whittled them down, then Democrats in the House discarded what remained, leaving local government reform legislation all but dead.
Now, the question persists: What happened? Why did these proposals with such powerful support fail so dramatically to garner much backing?
Some say the proposals fell flat because they were aimed at correcting problems most Hoosiers weren't experiencing. Some say a beleaguered economy doomed the reform effort from the start. Some say it's irresponsible to eliminate the fail-safe for those left behind by county-level consolidation and overburdened state agencies.
What Southwestern Indiana lawmakers share in common: They roundly refused to back the Kernan-Shepard reforms.
"Look at what's happened," said Rep. Suzanne Crouch, R-Evansville. "Look at people losing jobs, unemployment at a 20-year high. All of a sudden, reforming local government isn't on people's radar screen. It's not that it's wrong; it's not that it's bad. It's just not what the public is clamoring for right now."
Two freshman representatives - Democrat Gail Riecken of Evansville and Republican Mark Messmer of Jasper - said a top-down approach hurt the local government reform effort, and that supporters hadn't offered clear enough evidence to prove such changes would save taxpayers money and improve services.
"It's just some of the basic homework that hasn't been done," Riecken said.
Messmer said that while House Democrats ultimately killed the reform legislation, he didn't think any lawmakers were "ultimately really in support" of the proposals.
"If you want to look at improving local government, it needs to come from the ground up," Messmer said. "Talk to the people who do the jobs. That's probably where the process should have started."
Still others say the public simply didn't want to sacrifice its polling-place power to keep local government responsive in order to streamline its structure.
"Legislators listen to their constituents. It's no more complicated or complex than that," said Dennie Oxley, the former state representative from English, who Democrats nominated as their choice for lieutenant governor in 2008.
"More than they listen to any interest group or commission, legislators listen to their constituents," he said. "And that's why Kernan-Shepard failed."
Reform proponents said the problem is the tribal nature of lawmakers bent on protecting their own and unwilling to consider abolishing positions some of them have held in the past.
"The cards were stacked from the beginning," said Marilyn Schultz, a former state representative who now heads MySmartgov.org, a lobbying group that supported the Kernan-Shepard proposals.
The governor's office refused to comment for this report.
When Indiana's property tax crisis struck, officials as high-ranking as the governor and as down-home as school board members faced financial troubles that mandated creative ways of slashing spending and new approaches to funding problems.
In a state with more than 10,000 elected local officials, Daniels pinpointed local government as the starting point. With so many redundant layers, he said, it's the epicenter of the sort of waste and inefficiency Indiana must cut back on.
Daniels created the Kernan-Shepard Commission to spearhead the search for ways to streamline and modernize a local government structure he called a vestige of the horse-and-buggy days of Indiana's 1851 constitution.
In December 2007, the commission released its 46-page report proposing 27 changes - some small, some dramatic. With slight changes, Daniels asked legislators to enact 20 of those. Among them: Abolishing township government, eliminating three-person county commissions in favor of a single county executive, having officials such as county assessors and coroners appointed rather than elected, consolidating school and library districts and moving municipal elections to even years.
To put public pressure on lawmakers to make those changes, the Indiana Chamber of Commerce and other groups formed MySmartgov.org, a lobbying organization for the Kernan-Shepard reforms.
"Treat it as a starting point, but please treat it seriously, in a spirit of reform," Daniels urged lawmakers as the 2009 legislative session began.
The reforms were split into separate bills and introduced in the Republican-controlled Senate. There, MySmartgov.org and other reform proponents presented statistics such as one that showed 80 percent of poor relief in 2007 came from 20 of Indiana's 1,008 township trustee offices. They called on lawmakers to strip away the layer of government.
But they were countered by massive groups of township trustees, township firefighters and more. Opponents packed into committee hearing rooms with signs and shirts decrying what they said was an attempt to seize local control and hand it up to the county level with no regard for how that would affect citizens who counted on the services township officials provided.
"I think they provide a real service and a connection to people who have needs right away, and I'm really anxious about them not being there," Riecken said. "Centralization really does concern me."
As the proposed local government overhaul galvanized local officials who said bigger bureaucracy couldn't replace their roles, lawmakers listened.
"In the small, rural Southern Indiana counties, (township trustees and county commissioners) don't make much," Messmer said. "They do all their work on the evenings and weekends. Their constituents know they can get them at all hours of the day for emergency help. A few people at the courthouse working 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. just aren't as accessible."
Riecken and Messmer echoed sentiments of lawmakers in the Senate - Republicans and Democrats alike - who refused such dramatic reforms this year and instead sent a few severely weakened bills to the House.
There, the House Government and Regulatory Reform Committee did away with the watered-down Senate bills and amended several Kernan-Shepard bills in their original forms into one bill. The committee then dealt the fatal blow when it voted down that bill.
In the aftermath, reform proponents blasted lawmakers for protecting their friends at the township level from public accountability.
Crouch said Democrats' intent to kill the Kernan-Shepard bills in one fell swoop was clear, but that the Kernan-Shepard bills as they were initially proposed were "very, very controversial" and unlikely to pass anyway. Had the House worked from the weakened Senate bills, she said, some measure of local government reform passing this year would have been more likely.
While the Kernan-Shepard reforms appear dead at least for this year, there is still a chance some of the changes could be revived. The House and Senate will meet for "conference committee" negotiations in the waning days of a session that ends April 29. At that point, both sides could agree to work certain local government changes into bills such as the budget.
"We're deeply disappointed, but still hopeful, and now focused on the conference committee process," Schultz said.
While it's nearly certain that township trustees are safe, elected officials will remain elected and the single county executive idea won't float, some ideas have stronger backing - such as eliminating three-member township advisory boards and requiring professional certifications for positions such as county coroner.
That's exactly what the Kernan-Shepard Commission report warned of.
"In concert and quickly implemented, they (the reforms) will achieve their intended aim," the report said. "Taken piecemeal or prolonged, we'll be doing this again many years - and many dollars - from now."