Indiana

Township Talk

By Abdul Hakim-Shabazz

Unless you were paying close attention this week, there were three items in the news this week regarding local government which I think further illustrate the inevitable change that is coming to Indiana.

In Marion County, the Franklin Township Board voted 6-0-1 to move forward with fire consolidation.

Greenwood and White River Township are looking at a consolidation that when done would make them one of the larger municipalities in Indiana.

And for the first time, Township government budgets are coming under somewhat  real scrutiny because of a new law that gives County-Councils non-binding review over their budgets.

You can see an analysis of the township budgets here.  Marion County Twp Analysis If you look closely at the numbers you will see that many of the Townships sit on millions in operational fund balances and give out very little poor relief. That strikes me as odd for two reasons,  we are in one of the worst economic slowdowns since the great depression. Second, during the last legislative session, township officials bemoaned how much poor relief they had administer, give out, but as you can see by the analysis  the word of the day is large fund balance.

And for the record the analysis was presented by the Greater Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce to the City-Council and no Township officials showed up to dispute the figures.

And even stepping away from poor relief and looking simply at fire service I wonder how some of these departments are going to survive. Pike Township is seeing a close to $6 million drop in its fire fighting levy.  Lawrence is losing 1.4 million in its levy.  Wayne Township is increasing its fire budget from $21.1 million to $23 million.  I personally would like to know how they pulled this off in an age of property tax caps.

I bring all this up because we are a little more than three months away from the full impact of property tax caps.  And if large cities like Indianapolis, Ft. Wayne, Evansville and Carmel are going to have difficulties managing their budgets with less revenue, I can only imagine what it is going to be like for these smaller, and in many cases less useful,  units of government.

Full post as published by Indiana Barrister on September 19, 2009 (boomark / email).