News-Sentinel.com

Thursday, 12/21/2000

SON OF A SON OF A POLITICIAN

CHAPTER 2

Welcome to the Summit City, you've been annexed



Photo by Ellie Bogue
Message in a boxDuring controversy over annexing the Adams Center landfill, a white Cheddar and spinach pizza that Mayor Paul Helmke picked up from the Munchie Emporium contained a not-so-subliminal hypnotic message that an employee had written inside the pizza box. "I am getting sleepy. My eyelids are getting heavy. I am falling into a trance. I will oppose expansion of the landfill. I am getting sleepy. I will do all in my power to protect the safety of the citizens of Fort Wayne regardless of income level. I am falling into a deep trance. I will not compromise the future health of future generations. I do not want the pizza maker to be upset with me. I am getting sleepy. Boy, this was a great pizza." A bemused Helmke kept the pizza box top.

Annexation has always interested me.

Growing up around State and Anthony boulevards, I saw what the community was evolving into. For example, my mother's family lived on West Drive, and the area just to the north of it was farmland. Kirkwood Park was not that much farther away, yet it was outside the city limits, even when I was starting high school.

I sensed growing up here how things changed and how things grew. For a kid who lived on the north side of town, Time Corners on the southwest side was the end of the universe. In the eighth grade, I had a crush on this girl in my class who lived in the Glenwood neighborhood. I remember riding my bike to Glenwood. Not only was it a huge distance, but you rode past this farm field on State and Lake avenues to get there. It was one of those new suburbs very far out there.

When I attended North Side High School, the area from where students came from was large. It took in most of St. Joe Township. A part of Fort Wayne Community Schools was even outside the city limits. So when you went on dates or parties with students from such faraway neighborhoods as Waterswolde or Hacienda Village, you realized how much farmland you were driving past to get there.

After law school, I saw how much the town had grown up. It became urbanized. You really got the sense what was once farmland was now truly urban and part of the city. I used to mention Devils Hollow; it was just a place kids went to park with their girlfriends. It was just an isolated area way out there in horse country. It was something different then and the nature of it has changed in the last 20-30 years.

It also was interesting to see housing and commercial patterns change. Even before I was paying too much attention, the stores downtown like Sears moved to Rudisill Boulevard when I started kindergarten in 1954. It was after I graduated from high school that Glenbrook Square opened up. You saw these changing patterns. The people who lived on my street or went to my school were moving out.

An early interest

So when I started out as a young lawyer, I became active with Fort Wayne Future. And one of the topics I got interested in was government structure and annexation. I can still remember John Stafford, a young planner with the city, speaking to us about what had happened with annexation in Indianapolis and Lexington, Ky. We talked about the different outcomes that could occur in a community with annexation. And if a city didn't annex in ways that reflected growth and demographic and economic realities, a community needed to look at a new structure of government.

I got involved also in the early 1980s doing legal work for the St. Joe Township community association in its fight with the private utility Inbalco, the predecessor of Utility Center, now AquaSource. Folks were getting crummy water from the private utility. It looked like orange Faygo pop. We had a lot of battles with state regulatory groups to pay attention. Eventually, we raised the issue to such a profile, the city came in and acquired that portion of the utility with the goal of providing quality water for suburban homeowners.

I still remember talks with the township association at the time when the city, with Win Moses Jr. as mayor, made annexation overtures. People said if the city asks for annexation in return for good water, they would do it. Then, the city bought the private utility system in St. Joe, gave residents good water and never asked them to be annexed. It struck me as a missed opportunity. While I was happy for my clients who got good water, I wondered why annexation discussions weren't occurring at the same time.

In 1983, when Bud Meeks was running against Moses for mayor, I worked on that campaign and researched the issue of annexation. There was some sense that a number of annexations that were started under the previous administration of Republican Mayor Bob Armstrong were not advancing. Other than an attempt to take in the Blackhawk neighborhood, which was languishing in court, not much else was happening.

An election issue

Then, when I decided to run in 1987, one of the points I made from the start was the fact we had not been aggressive enough in annexation and had fallen behind. The inactivity was hurting the long-term future of the community. And I sensed at the time, annexation wasn't happening for political considerations. A Democratic city administration and City Council might be reluctant to annex areas seen as Republican.

Regardless of politics, annexation was important. While Moses was not against annexation, Democrats paid lip service to it. But I made it a top priority. I wanted to go after all adjacent areas that hadn't been incorporated. For example, I was for taking in the area between Fort Wayne and New Haven. The fight over those East End industries had been languishing since the early 1950s. It just didn't make sense to me.

When I got into office, I made it clear to officials that annexation was a top priority. We formed an annexation team not only of planners, but also legal staff, advisers, and service providers. We kept it in place throughout my 12 years. We discussed pending annexations, litigation and legislation on annexation.

One of the early discussions centered on where would we start. Northeast was the obvious choice. It was the most urbanized and urbanized the longest. It had gotten larger since the late 1950s, when the Nickel Plate railroad was elevated downtown to eliminate train crossing delays. As a result, it opened up migration to the suburbs. No longer was the north side of town the area of State and Anthony boulevards.

The county isn't the answer

Earlier, as assistant county attorney, I had worked for the county highway department. One of the testy issues dealt with Arlington Park, outside the city. Residents had raised issues about maintenance of streets and curbs. The highway department's philosophy was it didn't handle residential neighborhoods, or its streets and curbs. Instead, it maintained county line roads and long thoroughfares. It dawned on me that county government was not set up to deal with these issues. The services Arlington Park wanted were the kind the city could provide. My 14-year experience with county government showed it wasn't set up to deal with urbanized issues. Instead, the county was better off dealing with rural and less dense parts of town.

When we chose to annex northeast, we made several significant decisions. One was tactical. We'd go after big areas instead of a small. In the past, annexations were small and incremental. The last large annexations were of Canterbury Green and Glenbrook Square. Since then, they were of smaller areas like the Blackhawk and Marketplace of Canterbury neighborhoods. Yet we noticed the city faced the same amount of delays, legal fights and citizen anger from a small annexation as from a large one. If the city was going to have annexations languish in courts and pay lawyers to pursue them, you might as well go for a big chunk. It costs you about the same in terms of time and controversy.

A phased approach

Another significant decision was to structure the northeast annexation into four phases. It became one large annexation, portions of which came in at different times. It appeared people would be less angry the longer you waited before actually taking them in. The longer it took for the extra taxes through annexation to kick in, the less likely people would be willing to pay money to fight the takeover.

Using deferral dates made a lot of sense. Without them, it was easy for opponents to get contributions from property owners. A court battle would allow people in an area to delay annexation, and the longer they stalled, the more those people were saving in taxes as opposed to being brought in right away.

But with a three-year deferral, arguments from opponents made a lot less sense. If the issue was settled during that time, all you've done is paid for lawyers without any savings in return. We used deferrals as a tactic to win and to better plan the delivery of services in large areas. We just weren't sure how the strategy would hold up in court.

An uncertain future

Would people fight it? Would City Council go along? How would the courts respond? If this didn't work, then we should focus on consolidating local government. If annexation wasn't going to work, we'd argue consolidation was the only way to effectively deal with sprawl, growth and a shrinking tax base. But if annexation worked, we hoped suburban folks would realize they'd eventually become a part of the city, so why pay city and county taxes? Why have the duplication and overlap of government?

We had a law on the books for annexation, but not for creating a consolidated, unigov-like government. So we opted to try annexation as a tactic first, even though both issues were somewhat interchangeable.

We also tried to take care of our pending annexation in Blackhawk. It had languished so long in court we dismissed it and started again. The same with the Tamarack neighborhood. We met with Mayor Lynn Shaw to resolve the New Haven issue as well. We decided which areas New Haven would annex, and those Fort Wayne would take. We now border each other.

We spent a lot of time putting together a good plan, announced it at the end of 1988 and scheduled public hearings.

One of the biggest mistakes was a slip of the tongue from Greg Purcell, than head of Community and Economic Development. We had a major meeting scheduled in December to discuss annexation with residents. We set up the meeting as non-confrontational as possible. Instead of a mayor facing an angry crowd, we set up the meeting in a high school gym with different tables for people to get answers about services, like police and fire protection. Officials were there to answer questions, not to provide a forum for anti-annexation supporters.

But the first meeting happened on a poor weather night. Purcell gets quoted the next day saying the poor turnout showed people in St. Joe must support annexation. My reaction? Oh, don't say things like that! It's like a team putting up on a blackboard a controversial saying from an opposing player to get the blood boiling. The quote got people stirred up. And I mean they really got stirred up.

Angry folks in St. Joe

In a lot of ways, St. Joe was a lot more bitter and controversial than the annexation effort in Aboite Township. People were angry. When the City Council had a hearing, people packed the room with signs: "King Helmke's Tax" and "It Ain't Over Till the Fat Lady Sings!" were some of the nastier ones.

Part of the timing was interesting. Annexation was coming up the same time there was another City Council vote coming up on creating a local income tax. And, there was the special election to fills Dan Coats seat in Congress when he went to the Senate after Dan Quayle became George Bush's vice president. I decided not to run for Congress so as not to politicize the issues of the county option income tax or annexation. I realized both of votes would be on a party line if the issues became politicized. And with City Council 7-2 Democrat, I knew I'd lose both on the tax and annexation issues.

But I got support from the council on annexation, even from hard-liners like Councilman and former mayor Paul Mike Burns.

During the special election for Congress, Jill Long used these issues against Dan Heath, my chief of staff and her opponents. She criticized him for being part of an administration that pushed these controversial and disliked issues. Yet there was no response from the Heath for Congress staff to these accusations. Instead, St. Joe residents put up tables next to polling places on Election Day to collect petition signatures against the annexation. Eventually, St. Joe residents turned in what appeared to be enough signatures. But some were eventually thrown out as invalid, lowering the number to less than half required by law to mount a successful court challenge to annexation.

You can't make everyone happy

I've been criticized in the most recent Aboite annexation for not working with folks out there. But one of the lessons from St. Joe is you can work with every group you find to make them happy, but there's always another group that isn't. Nobody really speaks for the group as a whole or can act for the whole until you have litigation that brings the two sides to court.

We had separate discussions with Hacienda Village and Arlington Park about improvements out there; we tried to reach agreement with them. We also met about Fire Department issues. Folks liked the township volunteer fire department. So we tried to work with the township trustee and fire department, and reached an agreement we believed fair regarding a dual fire response and hiring some of their people.

Seemed like a reasonable effort people were asking for. Instead, elected folks from St. Joe who cut the deal were seen as trafficking with the enemy and were thrown out. Ken Nicolet is now the street commissioner, and Jack Webb, from the board, came on to work for the city after they in effect were thrown out politically for daring to even speak with us.

It became a more strident group, and it got testier as the battle lines were drawn. When we went to court, we believed there were enough signatures we could dispute as invalid to bring opponents under a 50 percent majority, squashing the lawsuit. It all depended on how you counted the signatures and how you considered sewer waivers, multiple property owners, and husband and wife signatures. We lost at the trial court level, as we have in the Aboite annexation. But we won reversal on appeal, and as a result, won the case with a final decision in September 1991.

It's all in the timing

I felt good about the timing. We moved this thing through in about two years. This one didn't languish in court forever. The bad part, however, was the decision came about two months before I'm running for re-election for the first time against Democrat Charlie Belch. And all the while, the city has added new voters with "King Helmke's Tax" and "It Ain't Over Till the Fat Lady Sings" signs in their yards. I wasn't sure how it would affect me politically. But I carried nearly all the precincts, although by lesser Republican margins than in the past. My take on the results? While annexation was controversial, there was a difference between controversial and popular. The people who were very vocal and loud were not the majority. The lesson I learned is you're not hearing from the majority of the people. Instead, you're hearing just from the people who want to be loud.

However, there never was a legal challenge to the use of a phased-in strategy of annexation because the matter was lost when opponents failed to get enough signatures for a lawsuit. The annexation was never judged on its merits, including the use of phases. We never were sure what would have happened if the courts had ruled on the merits, But when it comes to annexation, cities usually win on the merits. We had done our homework, especially with service delivery.

So what's all the fuss?

When the whole thing ended, annexation didn't have any major negative political impact and in St. Joe, there were no further legal challenges.

I still talk with Stafford and others, and they're amazed we pulled it off. We put a lot of eggs in this one basket and no one was sure if it would hold up politically or legally, and if we could get it done. But we got it done.

And it's worked well. We've now brought in all four phases. We're providing the services we promised even though some folks are still disgruntled. We've added fire stations, increased city personnel and are doing a good job.

Let's be fair

Here's an example I give people when speaking of the need for annexation:

At one stage in the St. Joe annexation battle, there was a controversy in the Blackhawk area about crossing guards and stoplights on State Boulevard near Blackhawk school. Children who were going to the middle school from the north had to cross State. The area was outside the city limits at the time. Residents were lobbying county commissioners for a light or something else to make it safer. Commissioner Ed Rousseau even went out there and acted as a crossing guard to get a sense of the problem. But the county wasn't sure how much it would cost and if it could afford the project.

Finally, somebody from the parents group realized if they targeted the effort a block to the west, they'd be right on the city boundary line. The city boundary line at that time came up to a sharp point, like a point on a square, at the intersection of State and Arrowhead Drive. People realized the intersection was right there on the city limits. They argued to me the city should put in a stoplight to deal with safety concerns in the vicinity. And folks raised a lot of legitimate issues.

We brought the people in for a meeting in my conference room. We had a blown-up map of the area. After I heard their pitch, I said, let me get this straight. Blackhawk Middle School where these kids are going to, isn't the school outside the city limits? Yes, it's in Fort Wayne Community Schools but outside the city limits. Hmm. Now, the kids that have to dodge the cars, are they in the city limits? Well, all these kids were in the Blackhawk neighborhood north of State so they lived outside the city limits. Meanwhile, kids who lived south of State and west of Arrowhead were inside the city limits, and didn't have to cross the street.

School's outside the city, kids are outside the city, but we must be concerned about them. Well, it costs about $40,000 for a light, and to get the light hooked up to the traffic computer. With the kids and school outside the city limits, I'm trying to figure out justification for spending $40,000 of city taxpayer money for the project. So I asked about these cars the kids are dodging. We actually had done a study. These cars are going both ways. With morning traffic, 80 percent is coming from outside the city to Fort Wayne to work when kids are going to school. In the evening, it's the opposite, people heading for the suburbs to go home.

So you're asking me to spend city money for kids who live outside the city, who go to a school outside the city, who dodge cars from outside the city. What's the fairness of this? I have citizens in the city with unmet needs that still want traffic lights like this.

Their response was, "Oh, we don't want to talk about annexation. We don't want to get into those controversial political issues. We're talking about the safety of our kids." And I said that's precisely the point. I'm concerned about the safety of your kids too. Annexation is an issue because it gets into how and who provides services. It was clear from the discussion the artificial boundary at that point made no sense. And I tried to get the point across.

The poor subsidizing the rich

I wasn't done; I asked another question to figure out the justification. Maybe this is a poor neighborhood. We had done some studies and found out neighborhoods outside the city have an income of $35,000 a household; a household inside the city, $25,000. So not only was the traffic light for a school outside the city, for kids outside the city, dodging cars outside the city, suburban residents are asking the poorer part of the population to pay for it while they, the wealthier residents, don't.

I asked one last question. Maybe there was a special circumstance about the Blackhawk area. The only special circumstance I could find is the fact for the last 12 years Blackhawk residents were paying an attorney to fight us from making them a part of the city.

Again, this just shows how artificial boundary lines need to reflect where people live and work. The traffic light issue brought home the need for annexation and how you equitably pay for services. It's a question of trying to make sense of this nonsense.

A matter of class

To me it's a class issue. It's why long-range annexation makes sense. The older parts of a city are generally going to have a higher level of poverty, more senior citizens and most likely, a declining tax base. Businesses move to the malls at the edge of the city, affluent young families move to the suburbs and sometimes what follows are demolitions and patterns of urban decay. There are more minorities in the central city as well. If you don't move the artificial boundary lines to reflect where people are living, then you're going to get more pronounced inequities as to who is asked to pay for services.

Everyone benefits from a strong central city because of work, jobs, shopping and culture. Folks choosing a site for a new business often look at the downtown even if they are planning to locate in a cornfield in the suburbs because it shows how a community is taking care of itself. I've always made the point the challenges of crime, unemployment, blizzards and floods don't stop at the city limits. And the opportunities for growth don't stop there either. You got to have this kind of growth. If you can't have consolidated government to erase political boundary lines altogether, then actual boundary lines should reflect economic and demographic reality.

With the concept of unigov, I have always said you don't have to tax all people at the same rate. Urban and rural areas can be charged differently because of differing needs. You can have a single government and service providers but a two-tiered tax rate, like in Lexington, Ky. The most logical way would be to make it a function of planning. When land changes from cornfields to homes and businesses, then the territory changes its tax category from rural to urban. It would make boundary line decisions not controversial and political, but a land planning solution.

The hypocrisy of it all

I'm ticked off about the inherent hypocrisy. I've made the same arguments about annexation and consolidated government for 14 years. It's frustrating. There are so many misconceptions and untruths. You are always going to fight this battle. On this one, I've always been right, I've always been consistent and I feel like I'm going to keep saying the same thing about it. It's the one issue I really care about.

Annexation points out the inherent unfairness. It's a class issue. It's a racial issue. Part of it you see as the snobbery. Part of it you see as short-term thinking. If the only focus is what's my tax bill going to be next year, I can see why people oppose it. If you see it in terms of what's life going to be like for my kids and me the next 20 years and beyond, than you get a different response.

As someone who grew up here and whose family is from Fort Wayne, I see Fort Wayne in the long-term context. I would hope others who are living here could see it that way too. When you think long term about a community, whether your next year's tax bill goes up 30 percent or not isn't as important as whether the community is able to deal with its needs in the long run. That's a hard thing to get through to people and businesses.

They don't want higher taxes

Part of what bugs me is the complaint about how high people's taxes will become with annexation. Well, when an area's annexed, residents end up paying the same as I've been paying as a city resident all my life. And it's the same for others who live on Pontiac Street, Forest Park Boulevard or in Southwood Park. You get the impression Aboite Township is going to get saddled with brand-new, heavy taxes. Well, these are new taxes to them but they are the ones city residents have paid forever. If somehow I've been able to handle it, my neighbors have been able to handle it, why can't they handle it? They should be able to. It's the point I keep trying to make.

One of the advantages of Fort Wayne is the fact we haven't been hemmed in by old neighbors. You don't bump into older historic neighborhoods right on the border. In Aboite Township, the so-called towns of West Hamilton or Aboite aren't independent communities. Leo and Grabill, Monroeville and Huntertown are, not Aboite. There wasn't anything in St. Joe Township either. These areas don't have a history as individual towns. It's a tricky situation when the city's trying to grow, for example, and it bumps up against Leo. Even trickier was when the city bumped into Waynedale in the 1950s, because the area had a separate identity.

Smaller isn't always better

I get into arguments with folks that Republicans stand for less government, support a return of power home and the belief smaller is always better. But smaller is not always better. There are some issues to be dealt with on the local, not state or national, level. But often it's not the most efficient way to fix the streets, hire police, or deal with water and sewer services. You have to decide what should be the size to effectively deal with urban issues. Township government, for example, is not inherently better because it's smaller. Most folks don't even know what their township is, who's their township trustee and who serves on the advisory board. They don't know the township's budget and where the money goes.

People focus all the time on the income taxes I've passed. Yet these townships gets some of that income tax revenue. Does anybody know what they spend it on? You know what the city spends it on, or at least we try to publicize it. Some issues can be handled on the neighborhood level, but they are often connected to a larger picture.

It's where annexation and government consolidation come in: They are attempts to find out the right size to deal with issues. Things have changed a lot in 150 years. Fort Wayne is the capital of northeast Indiana. Folks in Angola and LaGrange come here to shop. It's not an argument for annexing those areas. But it's an argument for looking at the reality of how the economy works, how transportation patterns have evolved, and figuring out how to set up government. Local governmental has to change as technology, housing and demographic patterns change.

Holding a grudge against me

How did people personalize it against me? I used to joke that whenever a safety issue was brought up, I said I felt safe almost anywhere except in St. Joe. We tried to win people over during neighborhood walks after annexation, and sometimes it got a bit testy.

When you talk with people one-on-one, this is their attitude: We don't want to be annexed, we don't want to pay higher taxes, but we knew it was coming. I had so many people tell me that when they finally got city water, they knew annexation would follow. I had people who moved to the suburbs tell me the real estate agent made it known the area would be annexed in two or three years.

Maybe annexation wasn't their favorite thing, but they were blind if they didn't see it coming. Actually, most of them believed it was coming 10-20 years earlier, and were fortunate enough to get an extra 10-20 years of freedom they weren't counting on. People realized they were part of the Fort Wayne community and, as a result, annexation was the right thing to do.

I'd get nasty messages at home. I get folks who continue to do that. But when I had a chance to explain my point of view, even with those who'd disagree with me, they'd realize it was being done for strong legitimate reasons.

Politically, I kept thinking since I'm catching flak from these areas I'm annexing, I ought to be getting countervailing support from the people already in Fort Wayne. But that's politics: People against something get more revved up and hot than those who are supportive.

It helps city taxpayers

I tried to get the argument across to city neighborhoods that annexation is helping them in the pocketbook. While speaking with Memorial Park neighborhood residents, the issues they brought up were housing and the park pool. But I told them annexation is important as well for these reasons: If suburbanites pay higher taxes, it means they are helping keep your taxes low, and providing you with better streets, stronger police and better economic development. A lot of folks never made the connection. I still see letters to the editor saying the city shouldn't annex new areas because Fort Wayne should be taking care of what it has now.

But a reason we can't take care of what we have now is because the city has fallen behind on annexation. Meanwhile, annexation allows us to pay for services more equitably, deliver services more efficiently and keep taxes low. Part of keeping property taxes low was passage of the income tax; part of it was revenue from annexation. They allowed us to keep taxes low and help neighborhoods.

The reason Aboite and St. Joe fights annexation is the reason every city neighborhood should be enthusiastically for it.

Political suicide

Was I helping the GOP while screwing myself politically? It occurred to me that might be happening. We got more Republican voters with annexation while I'm doing political damage to myself. But I tried to present annexation as a nonpartisan issue. Council was Democratic, yet it approved annexation. I have to salute City Council members. The entire time I was mayor, the council looked at annexation as good for the city, not whether it was bringing in Republicans or something bad for Democrats. And that's how it should be.

Yes, it struck me that while I'm making all these folks really angry and committing political suicide, I'm helping the local Republican Party in the long run. I'm not the sort to sacrifice myself for the good of the Republican Party. But it was the right thing to do for the city. If anything, I wish Republicans would have given me a little more credit for helping them out.

My tactics were always pretty clear as to major annexations. I would do a major annexation at the start of each term. Pine Valley in 1992 after my second election, Aboite in 1996 after the third. I was always pretty clear I wanted to get the adjacent urban areas and I would be moving around the city in a counterclockwise way because that's where development occurred first. First St. Joe, then Pine Valley, then Aboite.

Pine Valley, coming in the next two years, wasn't very controversial at all. You never saw the animosity and nastiness like in other areas. Folks there saw we were winning in court and delivering services fairly smoothly. You didn't hear people complain they weren't getting services they had been promised.

I remember going to a St. Joe meeting where someone made a big deal about not getting services promised him. I checked into it and learned the area he was talking about wasn't part of the area that was annexed. And the situation proves a point: People just don't know where is that arbitrary boundary line.

Pine Valley went relatively smoothly and I wished Aboite had gone the same way. Around this time of the Aboite annexation, legislators got involved. None of those legislators, it seemed, wanted to run out and change the law for St. Joe or Pine Valley. But for Aboite, legislators seemed to have a different agenda.

We also took on a landfill

The annexation of Adams Center landfill also was controversial, but for different reasons. One, it was voluntary; the landfill wanted to be part of Fort Wayne and not New Haven, its other neighbor. Second, it was part of our battles with New Haven over territory. And third, the existence of a hazardous waste landfill had a lot of opposition in the community even before Fort Wayne annexed it.

I separated the issue of the landfill's desire to expand from the issue of annexing the property. When an area came to me requesting voluntary annexation, I didn't know how I could logically say no at the same time I was aggressively pushing annexation in other areas. This was at a time St. Joe had just ended, and Pine Valley's annexation was getting readied. I had to be consistent. I was going to annex all the adjacent urban areas, or basically, anything I could.

All of a sudden, I'm presented with a case that wasn't on our target list or an area we had been looking at that wanted to come in voluntarily. My first concern was how can I logically say no, I don't want you in the city, even though you're trying to be annexed voluntarily, but say yes when it's not voluntary with anybody else. It's really hard to defend the moral high ground of my philosophy everyone should be part of the city and paying for its future when I was willing to do it with folks who didn't want to come in but not willing to do it with folks who did.

I wasn't just thinking about the landfill, but our long-term strategy for the city. I didn't want it thrown at us we were picking and choosing. If we were accused of that, it would weaken our position, at least politically.

Annexation did not equal expansion, I always said. Other folks wanted to turn it into an issue about what the landfill was doing. That to me was a separate issue.

David vs. Goliath

Part of the whole discussion also dealt with the situation between New Haven and Fort Wayne situation. Annexation meant we would be competing with New Haven long range. While I wanted New Haven to grow and prosper, I didn't want New Haven to be encroaching on areas I considered part of Fort Wayne or its growth.

Since the first term, we had a number of run-ins with New Haven. On the other side of town, there was the Shordon Estates area. If Fort Wayne had done this kind of annexation, we would have been lambasted by the media. Basically, New Haven went up Landin Road and just annexed the road and then annexed the neighborhood on top of the road. It looks like a little flag atop New Haven's boundary line.

I considered the area north of the river more properly part of Fort Wayne's growth, not New Haven's, it's why Shordon Estates was of such sensitivity to us. I didn't want New Haven moving too much into St. Joe Township or moving down the southeast side of Fort Wayne. New Haven moving east was fine.

Once New Haven started going for the landfill, we got concerned. We wanted to be able to control our future growth and not have New Haven make an end-run around us. We were really concerned about how New Haven was going about its business. New Haven basically annexed the area in a single night. Our procedures for annexation called for a plan commission hearing and a public hearing before City Council. Our process, even on a short time line, still was about three weeks. New Haven announced it, introduced, waived the rules and voted on it all in a single evening. It got us very concerned about how New Haven was doing business. It not only made us nervous, but concerned about anything else New Haven could be up to in adjoining areas.

Landfill nervous of New Haven

New Haven's actions, however, were thrown out by the court. As a result, the landfill folks came to us requesting voluntary annexation. We checked to make sure we weren't picking up a huge liability. We did some research and found out, because of potential liabilities in the future, many communities got agreements on tipping fees and extra payments from the landfill.

So we asked for some considerations to protect us from future negatives. We reached an agreement on tipping fees, some of which went to the Central City Housing Trust Fund, and it helped us do quite a bit in southeast Fort Wayne. Some other dollars came in. My attitude is if they want to be annexed, and are willing to pay more for housing and public works for the community, why not? It didn't commit us one way or another to expansion; it's how things worked out in the end.

Statewide reputation

I developed a statewide reputation on annexation, although I'm not sure it's a good one. As we did more of them, and were moving in a counter-clockwise direction, folks in Aboite knew it was coming. One of the thing folks out there did was work the legislative route more than in the past.

Sometimes we had legislators who believed they were helping the city. But we weren't sure whether they were helping or not. Mitch Harper, for example, used to come up with ideas that at some levels could have helped us but on other levels, could have hurt us as well. After our first year, we realized it was even dangerous to raise the issue of annexation with the Legislature. We were more likely to get anti-annexation language instead of language in the law that could have helped us negotiate with residents about different kinds of municipal services and different ways to pay for them.

On the defense

So, we went from a proactive position to a more defensive position, particularly when we got closer to the Aboite annexation. We began to hear more anti-annexation rumblings from the state legislature, particularly from Rep. Bob Alderman. It's interesting to note, as long as it was just Rep. Alderman, we were able to keep things from changing against us in the General Assembly.

Things started to get tricky when other legislators supported anti-annexation legislation because of concerns in their communities. One was Rep. Dean Mock from the Elkhart area; often, Alderman would hook up with Mock and his approach against annexation. Even then, working with the Indiana Association of Cities and Towns, we were pretty effective keeping things from changing. It was one of the benefits from my active participation in IACT; with my involvement, and my becoming its president, IACT folks were lobbied for us along with pro-annexation mayors from other parts of the state.

Things also got really tricky when the city of Carmel started to do aggressive annexation. Carmel is a wealthy area, with a healthy growth rate, north of Indy. It hit home when a new mayor in 1995 began to aggressively annex. It caught the eye of legislators around Indy and they have quite a bit of clout.

Legislators gang up on us

So we had the Alderman and Mock efforts under control. But when the Indy area legislators got upset about Carmel's activities, it got harder to fight off legislative efforts to change the rules. Eventually, we had a couple of sessions it looked like we were really going to get messed over. And Rep. Win Moses did a great job helping us keep things from changing.

It's interesting. Here's Win, who was my opponent in 1987, who now is a legislator who obviously understood municipal issues. He really did a great job helping the city fight back some of the most extreme anti-annexation legislation. It was fun. At an IACT convention in Fort Wayne afterward, Win was awarded legislator of the year by the association. It felt good to give him the award as thanks for his efforts. It shows in politics you could have folks you run against or are opposed to you on some issues on your side at other times. But you keep the lines of communication open with them nevertheless to work with them on other issues.

The anti-annexation spirit kept growing. We were able to beat back any attempts to make changes retroactive, which would have really hurt us on the Aboite annexation, introduced in late 1996.

Et tu, David Long?

What also hurt us was state Sen. David Long, who was part of the anti-annexation efforts. The situation was very disappointing to me. Long had been a strong supporter of annexation while on the City Council. He had voted for every annexation ordinance that we had introduced until the summer of 1995. Then, when he had already become a candidate for state Senate, I remember joking with some folks that we had helped him out by passing an annexation ordinance in the summer of 1995. It gave Long an annexation ordinance to vote against to make his anti-annexation conversion look a little bit more honest.

Part of the equation with Long is he believed he'd have a primary election race with Mitch Harper for the open state Senate seat when John Sinks stepped down. Harper had some concerns with annexation law when he had been in the Legislature, had done some things with New Haven, and had been talking about the issue. Long felt he had to establish his bonafide anti-annexation credentials or he'd be in danger in the GOP primary election.

Harper, however, ended up not running but Long had already staked out his position. But at least, Long came across as someone in the state Senate we could talk work with in moderating some of the more strident anti-annexation tendencies. But having Long in the Senate, joining Alderman in the House, combined with other anti-annexation communities statewide made it tougher and tougher to fight the backlash. The Legislature finally did pass some legislation in 1999. But crucial to us was the fact the legislation wasn't retroactive, hurting us in Aboite Township.

The legislation made it harder to annex, but not impossible. It was one of the tactics the Aboite group used more successfully than people in other parts of town. They were able to get their state legislators on board. It strikes me as a bit tricky for some of these legislators to answer questions about why they didn't get involved when some areas were being annexed, but jumped into the fray when Aboite was involved.

Aboite in Fort Wayne makes sense

The Aboite area is one I believed all along fit the criteria we had been talking about. It was an increasingly urbanized area, clearly tied to the city. It hadn't been an independent entity; people in Aboite had their jobs based in Fort Wayne areas, they were connected to Fort Wayne, their future livelihood depended on Fort Wayne. Fort Wayne's success dealing with crime, public works and economic development directly affected them.

Therefore, it made sense it should come in after St. Joe and Pine Valley. But it also clearly was an area that ought to be part of the city for all the right reasons. There were things we could do to help out the Aboite area. In public works, the area needed a lot with utilities. While not required by an annexation plan, we felt it was something we could offer that could make a difference for residents there. The same was true with traffic issues, whether it meant removing the tracks on West Jefferson near Swinney Park or other long-range issues. We believed the city could help them.

The anti-annexation folks started organizing long before we introduced our plan. I used to hear from attorneys and friends they were getting ready to fight; a lot of folks saw it coming. And we were pushed into doing things even more quickly than I had wanted by legislative efforts and efforts to incorporate into the town of West Hamilton.

It was after the legislative session of 1995, when Alderman had some introduced anti-annexation legislation, where he and I reached an agreement that put the legislation on hold. Meanwhile, I put annexation on hold while we tried to see if things could be worked out.

Ever heard of West Hamilton?

But after the 1995 session had ended, folks in Aboite went to the County Commissioners, asking to be incorporated as the town of West Hamilton. To me, the move was a real challenge to the future of our community. If we had an incorporated entity of West Hamilton, or any other name out there, it would make annexation impossible and would hamper the future growth of Fort Wayne. It wouldn't make sense for the growth of the community. It would be more a throwback to the old, rejected ideas of incorporating South Wayne, the area south of Creighton, or Waynedale, and in effect, divvying up the community.

And it probably made even less sense than those previous efforts because there wasn't any 'there' there. There was no center to West Hamilton. There was no commercial district, no identifiable downtown or center square. It wasn't Leo or Grabill or Arcola or Monroeville. There wasn't anything there. It was obviously just a ploy to stop the annexation efforts. And a pretty good ploy, too. I saw it as a serious threat that had to be dealt with.

Helpless and exposed

The catch: There wasn't much we could do. Once the petition was filed with the commissioners, we were restricted from proposing annexation in the area unless commissioners dismissed the petition. Commissioners, meanwhile, put the entire petition under advisement for what seemed be a long time. Almost a year had gone by and they just sat on it. We were concerned; it was hard to tell how commissioners would act on it. Commissioner Ed Rousseau was against the town; Jack McComb was for it. Linda Bloom was the swing person and it wasn't clear where she stood.

All of a sudden, in the latter part of '95 and early '96, we're concerned about the future, the General Assembly and town of West Hamilton. And we hadn't even introduced anything; these were pre-emptive measures. We tried to work with commissioners and lawmakers. It finally became clear to me the tactic from the other side was to keep everything on hold, and wait for the 1997 legislative session to get through anti-annexation legislation to thwart our move in Aboite. If our hands were tied with West Hamilton and Alderman, than we were going to be in a real tricky situation.

So in 1996, we tried to figure out our strategy. We tried to work with folks. Rousseau was up for re-election that year and didn't want it to become an election issue. So part of our timing was controlled by the election schedule. We felt here's the one politician out of the three who might be the friendliest toward annexation, so no sense in making Rousseau any angrier than necessary. We tried to keep things relatively quiet until after the fall 1996 election.

West Hamilton keeps getting larger

Meanwhile, there was an additional filing by anti-annexation folks, doubling in size the proposed town of west Hamilton. I remember walking down the first floor of the City-County Building when I saw local Pizza Hut owner Dick Freeland carrying some pizza. I love pizza. I love Pizza Hut pizza. And I said "Boy that smells great, Dick." And he was taking them up to the commissioners' office. So I either tagged along or wrangled an invitation to share some pizza. And guess what? They were meeting to talk about the West Hamilton annexation. I'm not sure they wanted me to hang around with pizza while they're doing their discussion. It became clear a lot of people were talking to the commissioners about this issue.

I was seen as the enemy. But we had an effective group here. I remember something else that really spurred me on. I got an e-mail at the end of 1996 from this young man, an IPFW student, who was active with the anti-annexation movement, Dan Lennington. And his was basically an in-your-face e-mail. It said we got you stymied because of the pending West Hamilton petition, and additional legislators were coming on board to our side. And we got great lawyers on our side. So in a sense, he was saying checkmate to us.

The Chinese menu approach

So we waited until after the election. And we came up with a plan, sort of a Chinese menu approach. It had an option A, and an option B. I had planners work on two different annexation plans for the area. Option A was to assume West Hamilton was created and to figure out what we could annex even with it out there. Since West Hamilton could not go closer than two miles to our city limits, we could go up to the boundaries of the proposed town. Planners drew up the plan with all its inherent costs and legal obligations.

I also had them come up with option B. What would we do if West Hamilton wasn't there? We would take a larger annexation and the boundaries would be different. And we decided to have both of these plans ready to go.

Strategy

What would we do? We argued and talked strategy. Eventually, I came up with the idea we would present both of these to City Council as option A and option B. We set it up so council would be on board with one or the other annexation plan, with whatever the council chose determined by the decision by county commissioners since they still had not acted on the West Hamilton petition. It was set up so commissioners would have to act on West Hamilton's request because it looked like they would sit on it until May 1997 when the Legislature ended its session.

If we waited, we might get stuck with some bad legislation or who knows what else. Maybe West Hamilton would have been created by this time. We just weren't confident with what commissioners might do.

The two options presented to the council, in effect, were presented to the commissioners as well. We spoke with council about this, and got its support. I preferred the option that would not have a West Hamilton. But I also feared if we had not forced the commissioners' hand we'd get stuck with all sorts of bad things.

High noon

We determined if the commissioners rejected West Hamilton, we'd have a longer deferral date. If they didn't, we would annex the rest of the area immediately. It was something that forced the commissioners' hand. The trade-off? If you want West Hamilton, then the rest would become part of Fort Wayne almost immediately. Or get rid of West Hamilton, and annexation can wait until a later date.

Council, meanwhile, supported us. We realized the risk of the county getting angry with us. But it was a risk worth taking.

Then we met with the commissioners. They were not excited about the prospect. They didn't like their hand being forced on anything. One commissioner who we thought supported us, Ed Rousseau, didn't like it either but we believed we had few other options.

A testy meeting

I still remember going to the commissioners' office with Payne Brown, my public safety director, and city attorney Tim McCaulay. Commissioners and county attorney Bill Fishering were there. We talked about what we were doing. My goal was to get them to buy into this concept of annexation and not get into heavy warfare with them. I wanted them to dismiss the petition.

It started out as a testy meeting. I offered our proposal, the not-so-harsh one with a deferral date. They rejected it. We went through a lot of discussion. At one stage, Rousseau came back, intentionally or not, with pretty close to what I had started out with. I told Payne and Tim ahead of time, let me run the discussion and keep your mouths' shut. I had dealt with commissioners before.

However, Payne was about ready to say Ed's proposal was similar to the one the city had originally proposed when I kicked him under the table to get him to keep his mouth shut. And we were able to get close to an agreement where the commissioners would dismiss West Hamilton's petition and we would ask council for the deferred annexation, or option B. It's what I wanted to happen.

Afterward, Payne was impressed. I told him sometimes you have to let things happen, talk them through and explain the logic, and commissioners would come around. In the end, commissioners voted 2-1 against it, with Jack McComb dissenting. Then we got council approval and assumed there would be enough signatures from Aboite residents for a court fight.

Other battlefronts

Meanwhile, we still had battles with legislators. And we lost at the trial court level. It was very disappointing.

I was very concerned about the timing. I made the decision in December 1998 not to run again and I had hoped we would have the Aboite annexation far enough along that my successor couldn't stop it. As of the end of 1998, we felt we were in good shape.

It would've been a lot simpler if the judge ruled against us while we were still in office because we could have filed an appeal. Since the Graham Richard administration decided to appeal, nothing was lost. But it would have saved me some worry.

Actually, when I made the decision not to run I was more concerned about a Joe Squadrito administration. I believed if he had been the new mayor, there might not have been the same decision to appeal the case. After Linda Buskirk won the primary election, I felt more confident either she or Graham Richard would appeal any court setback. I'm happy it worked out, but in retrospect, we cut the timing too close on the decision.

I still believe the city has a good opportunity to be successful on appeal. We've lost at the trial court level before on annexation issues. Hopefully, the city will pursue the matter aggressively and we'll get this thing done.

Legacy

If Fort Wayne were to lose the Aboite annexation, what would my legacy be? Obviously, I'd be very disappointed. But I'm still proud of what we accomplished. St. Joe Township has all come in, Pine Valley is coming in, other areas as well. The city's population will increase significantly along with its tax base. The community's ability to be vital has been strengthened because of annexation, and the tough political decisions and controversies we lived through.

Aboite's in everybody's best interest. But if we can't get the whole loaf, I'm still proud of getting two-thirds. If we hadn't annexed, we'd be in a position today of declining population and tax base, and inability to deal with problems.

I'd also be disappointed because I took all those political hits and got nothing for it. It wasn't pleasant, but I had gotten used to it because of St. Joe. I'd be in the YMCA sitting in the sauna and I'd get into arguments with people on the issue. I'd argue my point; they'd argue their point. And I'd try to persuade them.

It would be tense in some social situations. I'd see people, some of them friends, disagree with me. But we remained friends.

Personal considerations

There's so much peer pressure in neighborhoods with an issue like this. All the discussion centers around getting signatures on a petition to oppose annexation within a deadline. In Aboite, the opposition was organized from the start. And like in St. Joe, people's doors were knocked on two or three times for donations and signatures. People don't like to look their neighbor in the eye and say no, so they'd sign the petition. I'd hear from neighbors who didn't sign it and folks wouldn't understand why. I know some folks who signed the petition yet never brought up the issue of annexation with me.

After the petition against annexation was filed with the court, I got a copy of the list containing the names of all these folks. On that list, you'd see all sorts of folks who had called and asked me for favors, either as references, for awards, for help for their company, or to be involved in some civic activity. It was interesting to see how, on one hand, they could sign something that would hamper Fort Wayne's growth, while on the other, want the mayor, even as residents who didn't live in the city but still looked at me as their mayor, to promote their business or interests. I got used to it. I figured I was mayor for the entire community, not just Fort Wayne, and tried to do what's best for it.

It's hard not to personalize. However, I'm used to compartmentalizing. You remember but you do what you're supposed to do regardless. Politics, you learn, is a messy business. Going back to my first forays in politics, you figure some folks who are your friends will be against you. And you see it in other situations as well. You try not to take on a martyr complex. But I wanted to do what was right and I was willing to pay the cost for it, especially if we were going to get good results for the community.

Comes a-haunting

Obviously, this became an issue again politically in my 1998 U.S. Senate race against Evan Bayh. A lot of folks said there was no way I would do well, even in the GOP primary election, because of the anti-annexation fervor in Aboite Township. It's one of the most Republican and wealthy parts of the state. I believed my primary opponents thought I wouldn't even do well in my home base because of the annexation controversy.

I ended up winning an upset in the primary election.

I did better than some people thought. I carried Allen County, and folks didn't even think I would carry it. I had about 52 percent of the vote; maybe it would have been larger if I didn't have these problems.

I spoke with John Price -- who did very little campaigning in Allen County -- afterward and he said he was told I was so weak up here there was no way I was going to come close to getting any votes from Aboite. I believe people turned a controversial issue into an assumption I had no popularity or support at all, as people reasoned in St. Joe Township and Pine Valley.

My bottom line with Aboite: Most people don't want to be annexed and are angry at me for doing it. But they respect me as mayor and still figure me as a straight-shooter who tells it like it is. And sometimes you pay a political cost.

Trying to talk me out of it

There was a lot of pressure. There was one meeting at GOP party chairman Steve Shine's, sometime during this whole mess. We had a lot of state legislators, party officials, county officials there and I. All I remember is the discussion got into annexation with about 20 people against it on one side and just me. Tim Berry, county treasurer at the time, may have been the only one defending me.

It was one of these get-togethers where officials discussed what was coming up in the election. They didn't want events to come unraveled. All of a sudden, they're focusing on me and annexation, and with it comes the pressure. But I told them, I have to do what I have to do. And I'm doing what I think is right. Needless to say, it doesn't go over well with people who just look at political equations.

Most of them gave up trying to change my mind on annexation. I have always been willing to talk strategy; about whether to delay it or withhold pursuing annexation during an election cycle. It was not just as a favor to them, but because I realized politicizing the issue can have some real practical drawbacks. Sometimes with issues like this, you want to keep out of politics as much as possible. Sometimes politicians talk more sensibly about issues like annexation if they don't have an election coming up in a month or two.

But it was still hard for me to understand the animosity attached to the issue and the animosity attached to the city and people who live in it. Part of it's a racial or class issue.

When I got sworn in the third time as mayor, I mentioned a line in a New York Times column about Mexico City where residents put up high walls and tinted windows to keep out those people they didn't want to be exposed to. I didn't want our community to become one of those where people believed higher walls and opaque windows would cut out what was going on. We're all in this together.

Selfish arguments

The strident anti-annexation statements often were nothing more that a sense of, "I got mine and I don't care about you." It's an aspect that always bothers me. I get a lot of that kind of sentiment from people who live in a community where otherwise there is so much interaction. They're part of us; they're our neighbors. There's so much interconnection for people to be saying, "We don't want to pay. We don't want to be helping decide our future."

I believed such comments were very shortsighted, and from some people, very mean-spirited. It's hard to take. A lot of these people I worked with on boards and commissions, even before I became mayor. And to see that kind of approach I clearly believed was a mistake.

Part of it was the vilification. You could sense some of the hate I got in the mail and in the comments. You might disagree with me, but comparing me with Hitler, or Saddam Hussein, is getting pretty ridiculous.

The vision thing

Does this mean the community lacks vision? It's clearly a legitimate issue. I believed I was a pretty activist mayor and not everyone agreed with the activism.

This is a town where people are used to being able to stop things. Folks opposed to annexation have been able to stop things in the past, whether it was developments they didn't like or political moves they opposed. All of sudden, I wasn't getting stopped. If the monied, powerful or other elected people couldn't stop things, there was a sense the rules were being changed as to how the community did business.

I think part of my problem with the county was the result of annexation, and it worsened my relationship with the commissioners, particularly Jack McComb. It was sort of like, "How dare you force us to make a decision." A lot of groups are used to not having to make decisions, or making them publicly or in the spotlight. But I forced the county to make a very controversial decision in the glare of the public spotlight. And it's not the way they were used to doing business.

In some sense, my single-minded push for annexation was seen as a threat to the power of others to say no to things. Part of it ties to vision. This is a community that has problems getting its act together. When it comes to a long-range vision, it's hard to get consensus on one because groups don't like giving up any of their power. It applies to elected officials or influence groups; it's one of the challenges here.

Sometimes you have to go from your position of strength, and it was seen as heavy-handed. I don't mind when people disagree with me. But I do when folks argue to keep the community in a position where it can't do things when it wants to or at least if the majority wants to or when it's clearly the right thing to do. It's a town where it's hard to do those things, like annexation, even with support because one or two groups are against it.

After 12 years, do we have vision? My view hasn't changed after being mayor. My grandfather could tell stories from the 1940s, my father from the 1960s and '70s about how groups fought over issues. I think highly of the people in this community. It's just that sometimes, it's like pulling teeth to do it.

Our greatest moments have been in response to crisis. It shows hard work and pulling together can work here. But if it's not seen as an immediate crisis, it's tough to get them on board. We fight the flood, work on economic development after International Harvester leaves, but we reject the north-south, east-west thruway in the 1940s, we don't modernize let alone consolidate local government, we fight annexation and oppose civic improvements. We've fought the airport; we've fought the baseball stadium.

One of my strengths has been that I usually can figure out ways to get people to work together or at least get enough of them to go along with a new plan. It doesn't always make people happy, but the general public has supported this issue and supported me in what I was trying to accomplish.

Was I right?

Was Paul Helmke right? Folks will look back and say this was something we've done to make the community strong. You won't look back at what annexation's done to taxes. Even folks in St. Joe now realize they're getting better services and taxes aren't such a burden. Recent history smoothes a lot of that over. Over 50 years, folks will wonder why was it so much of an issue.

Consider this: How could we have looked at an area south of Creighton as a separate part of town? It wouldn't have worked. Everybody knows that. How could Waynedale think about staying separate? Forty years from now this is going to be a solid, urban area. We'll be judged on how we've been able to fight crime, grow and stay vibrant. And folks will say if we hadn't been able to do these things, like annexation, we'd have our hands tied behind our backs.

There's plenty of room here to grow, at least with availability of land. Look at other communities. One of our strengths is we haven't been hemmed in by other communities, and it's why West Hamilton so concerned me.

Do we want to be like Gary surrounded by other municipalities that prevented it from growing? In most cities on the East Coast, it's the same way. Cities with elastic boundaries were ones that were able to do better in tough times and take advantage of opportunities. Older cities, the Detroits and Garys, had inelastic boundaries you couldn't shift. It's researched in such books like Cities Without Suburbs. Cities like Phoenix and Charlotte, for example, can move their boundaries. It allowed them to be stronger.

We are in a situation where we don't need to be hemmed in, and with a decent annexation law, should be able to reflect the community's growth. It should position us well in the state, in the Midwest and the country.

One of the challenges is to make sure growth doesn't get out of control. But we have the room, water and land to grow. Our biggest lack is available work force. When people realize places like this is where you can make some money, and the quality of life is good, they'll come here. But we have to make sure we've got our act together to take advantage of the opportunities that come along.

Cast of characters:

Greg Purcell -- Top-ranking official who served under Mayors Win Moses Jr., Paul Helmke and Graham Richard

Bob Alderman -- State House District 83 representative for 24 years

David Long -- State Senate District 16 representative; previously, served as 4th District City Councilman

Jack McComb -- Allen County Commissioner who died this year; he opposed the city's annexation of Aboite

Richard Freeland -- Aboite resident and restaurant owner

Steve Shine -- Chairman of Allen County Republican Party; long-time local media personality