Townships

Kernan - Shepard Report

Jennifer Teising and Taletha Coles may have done us a favor.

Over the last several months lots of folks have been in touch with me to ask that either I personally or the West Lafayette City Council collectively "do something" about the governmental dysfunction in Wabash Township. Perhaps the folks in Lafayette are hearing the same thing over the misery in the Fairfield Township office.

Of course there is nothing we can do except "tsk,tsk" a little. City governments have no control over townships. Begun with an 18th. century survey system, townships may have made perfect sense in 1852 when they became part of the Indiana constitution. In the days of the horse and buggy, townships were responsible for schools, roads, libraries, property assessment and a few other services like the maintenance of abandoned cemeteries. Now townships mainly provide fire protection, emergency response, and poor relief, including indigent burials. No other state has this layer of government.

Wabash Township School #5 - Indiana Landmarks

But by every measure townships are now an expensive anachronism. Back in 2018 the Anderson Herald-Bulletin described townships as wasteful anomalies with endemic problems. Township offices are invisible and rarely open. Trustees hire on relatives and party political supporters. The salaries are sinecures. Townships are ripe for corruption with audits regularly revealing a lack of financial controls and misuse of public funds. There is little doubt that counties could take over all township duties, as they have with property assessment, and save money while improving efficiency.

We have known this for a very long time. In 2007, Governor Mitch Daniels asked then Chief Justice Randall Shepard and former Governor Joe Kernan to chair a bi-partisan commission on local government reform. His charge to them was this: “The purpose of the Blue- Ribbon Commission on Local Government Reform . . . is to develop recommendations to reform and restructure local government in Indiana in order to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of its operations and reduce its costs to Hoosier taxpayers."

Their findings became known as the Kernan-Shepard Report. The cover page read Streamlining Local Government - We've got to stop governing like this. Recommendation #9 was to transfer the responsibility for administering the duties of township government for assessment, poor relief, fire protection, emergency management services (EMS), cemeteries and any other remaining responsibilities to the county executive. Then, establish a countywide poor relief levy.

Generally, township executives (There are 1,008 townships in 92 counties in Indiana), who are generally Republican and have long been woven into party politics, hated the idea. Only property assessment moved to county government.

Original Annexation Map

 

When West Lafayette first mounted an annexation attempt to the west in 2012-2013 we heard from dozens of people in Green Meadows, Huntington Farms, McQuinn Estates, The Orchards, Sherwood Forest, and Wake Robin who all wanted nothing to do with our sewers, trash pick-up, policing, and fire service. They didn't want complicated or expensive government. They liked rural; "good enough" government.

Okay. So do a super majority of Republican legislators.

But when people have finished trashing the trustees on either side of the river I think it might be worth considering that there is a system in place that makes their erratic behaviors easier to imagine. Jennifer Teising and Taletha Coles have helped us to learn what townships are, what they do, and who does what they do at what cost. Now we should ask, again, why?