MySmartGov.org

The issue

The typical Hoosier taxpayer must answer to 26 local government officials.

How, you might say, can that be so? Hoosiers are such sensible people. We like small government.

 Well, perhaps we like small government too much.

We like it so much that we’ve kept 3,100 units of local government and the more than 10,000 officials who run them around for years. We’ve made few changes to the way we operate local government since the “new” state constitution was adopted in 1851, and most of those changes have only added to the burden.

Indeed, Indiana has

• 92 counties
• 117 cities
• 239 library districts
• 293 school districts
• 451 towns
• 886 special districts
• 1,008 townships
• 10,300 local officials

Unfortunately, we also have the property tax bills to finance all that government.

Those layers of government made sense back in 1851, when it was hard to travel and communicate. If a Hoosier needed help from an elected official, he’d have to travel by horse and buggy to the center of government, the township or county seat.  But it doesn’t make sense to maintain a 19th-century form of government when we’ve moved into the age of interstate highways, the Internet, cell phones and e-mail.

And it doesn’t make sense to pay for redundant layers of bureaucracy when our household budgets are stretched to the limit and our employers are so strapped that they’re laying off workers.

Over the last several years, elected leaders have taken steps to reduce property taxes.  Most recently, the General Assembly voted to place caps on the amount that homeowners, farmers, apartment owners and businesses will pay in property taxes.

While most of us were pleased about that when our property taxes bills came, we may be less happy when the local units of government supported by property taxes – public schools, cities and towns and others – tell us that, since they’re receiving less tax revenue, they have to cut services to stay within their budgets.

Doesn’t it make sense to cut overhead first – slice into the bureaucracy – before we eliminate or reduce services? We think so.

That’s why we support the streamlining measures recommended by the Indiana Commission on Local Government Reform, commonly called the Kernan-Shepard Commission. That bipartisan group, headed by former Gov. Joe Kernan and Chief Justice Randall Shepard of the Indiana Supreme Court, generated 27 ways to cut waste, create efficiencies, increase accountability and make better use of our scarce and valuable tax dollars.

If you agree that we need to reduce bureaucracy and use our tax dollars for services, tell your legislators to streamline local government. Join us, and we’ll tell you how.

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