Don't call it Unigov

A roundtable discussion on consolidated local government

On Monday, Aug 25, the Evening Forum hosted a roundtable discussion with eight government and private-sector leaders about the prospects of local government consolidation. Former Fort Wayne Mayor Paul Helmke and former city planner John Stafford were early and passionate advocates of consolidation. State Sen. Tom Wyss carried unsuccessful "charter government" legislation to allow a study of consolidation possibilities.

Andy Downs has worked for Mayor Graham Richard and has a wide-ranging knowledge of Indiana political history. Marilyn Moran Townsend is a representative of Invent Tomorrow and, as former president of the State Chamber of Commerce, speaks from a business perspective. Fort Wayne Community Schools Board member Geoff Paddock sheds light on the often-overlooked school-system interest in government structure. County Attorney Bill Fishering knows county officials' concerns about constituent interests.

Paula Hughes, as a county council member and president of the Downtown Improvement District, can understand the perspective of both urban and rural residents. The discussion was conducted by News-Sentinel Publisher Mary Jacobus and Editorial Page Editor Leo Morris.



QUESTION: If you were inventing local government now, what would your perfect local government be? Or if not perfect, at least something better than we have now.

TOM WYSS: When the government was formed as it is today, it served its purpose well. I think the problem has been that over the years we just haven't been able to adapt ourselves to what government should or could be. If I had to design it now, I guess I would want it to be -- I don't know how you get outside the county lines like that -- but I would like to see it be a government that addressed (regional issues).

It's kind of like, I say I'm from Allen County, but I've been a Fort Wayne resident all my life. But I think that there are a lot of areas where we do have duplications. When Paul (Helmke) and I were doing the charter government, we asked: Why do we have two police departments? Of course, we got reaction from some police officers that: Well, by God, it should be the county. Fine, we didn't care who it was. Just so we're not duplicating stuff.

I think the problem is really what we haven't done, and that's keep ourselves up with all the technological advancements that could make us a better government by being combined and reducing costs or just making ourselves more efficient.

I see where somebody made a complaint -- I think it was a letter to the editor -- where somebody said we can't run government as a business. I agree with some of that stuff, but you can be a heck of a lot more efficient as a government than we're set up to do today.

ANDY DOWNS: There are really two questions. First, what kind of government should we have and, second, how quickly can we get there? To answer the second one first, I don't think we can get there very quickly.

On the first, I'll go back a little further than Tom. If you go back to the very first constitution of the state of Indiana, it was put together by people primarily with agricultural interests, who came from Southern states into Indiana and dominated the political culture of the times.

When the second constitution was written in 1851, the one we live under right now, it actually retained a lot of those same sorts of values and feelings that were in the first constitution. And so, when you're looking at us a couple of hundred years later, living off the same document, there's a whole lot that could be changed. We are not the state we were in 1816, and we're not the state we were in 1851, or for that matter, 1900.

As for the ideal government, it's important that the system still have plenty of checks and balances in it. That's what it's supposed to have, and that's why we have an elected auditor and an elected treasurer and elected court recorder, because of the belief that people could be bought off, and if we appointed everyone, we just would have corruption running rampant in the government. So my concerns are: 1. People still be able to get the services they're supposed to get and, 2. There be plenty of checks and balances to make sure that nobody can run roughshod over government in one way or another.

JOHN STAFFORD: I would say that it would start out with county government -- not radically different than what we have -- having initial responsibility for everything that we call local government, including schools. There would be several fewer elected officials at the county level than there are now, primarily in the area of treasurer and clerk of the courts, which I consider to be primarily administrative in nature. And that county government would have a wide degree of latitude granted to it through the state constitution to design any additional local government as it and its constituents desire in that county.

QUESTION: Do you have a model you're thinking of?

STAFFORD: There are a number of states which do charter authority at the county level, allow their local governments to organize as they and their constituents want to be organized.

WYSS: That's in Ohio. If they don't have charter government, they have a modified version, I'm pretty sure.

HELMKE: They do for cities; I don't know if they do for counties.

STAFFORD: They let these decisions in local government be made by the

local electorate, because each county is different than the others. We're different here than a rural county, and we're different than a Marion County.

BILL FISHERING: I'm probably the only one who thinks government's changed since 1851. I do think it has been slowly evolving. Clearly there's a a question of whether it's evolved fast enough. Allen County was in the unique situation -- Paul is somewhat familiar with that -- there was very little annexation that went on for a number of years. That caused Allen County -- unincorporated Allen County -- to be like the fourth-largest municipality in the state of Indiana.

Until the mid-'70s, Allen County had no home-rule authority at all, let alone the limited home-rule authority it has now. We got home-rule authority at the same time we got the tax freeze. That made it very difficult for us to adjust to a variety of new things. I generally agree that it would take a while to change it. I generally agree that it could use change. I think the county generally agrees at the commissioner level that change is appropriate.

I would agree with John that the ideal setup would be similar to what you see in Fayette County (Kentucky) or one of those where they truly have authority to require all people in the county to be part of the mix. Tom's charter legislation in '92 let some people opt out. I don't think that benefits us. I think we're all in this as one large group, or we're not. And that's the way it ought to be treated.

Paul and I used to debate taxing districts. I still think that's perhaps the best way to accomplish some of those goals. I don't think there's any question at the county level that there aren't better ways to do it. I do think that to get it done, unless you want a -- pardon the expression -- botched-up mess like Indianapolis, you've gotta have some constitutional changes, which will be slow. I think at the county level we would generally agree we could use some revisiting of the issue.

GEOFF PADDOCK: There are a couple of points, in my view, that make our government strong and, in many ways, good and responsive. We do have legislative bodies which, unlike the state Legislature, are unicameral. Our county council and city council provide strong checks and balances, so important in government. So I think they hit that one on the head -- accountability, checks and balances, respect for the taxpayer and the citizen.

One area that perhaps is one of the reasons I was invited -- I'm relatively new and learning a lot as far as government is concerned -- is education. In the series I've read over the last few days (on consolidation, in The News-Sentinel), I don't know that it talked a lot about consolidating our education districts.

As I campaigned for this office last year, I ran into folks who said "Well, Geoff, I can't vote for you because I'm out in Aboite Township. Once we get annexed, we'll become part of FWCS." I would say, "Well, that's not necessarily the case. Unless there's some change in state law, your school district will remain the same." Their response would be, "You mean we would stay within Southwest Allen?" And I would say yes, and they would go, "Whew!"

So when we talk about consolidation and making government more efficient, can we talk about the school districts? One point I will make: We in FWCS are trying to participate. We want to work with the city and the county and other school districts as far as purchasing power. We're already doing that to a certain extent with petroleum products. I think we can expand that and might want to look at other school districts as far as our purchasing power for insurance. The good news is we've done some digging around and some homework, and we find that our insurance costs are going to go down. If we work together more and flex our muscles more with some of these insurance companies, we might be able to get better deals, not only for school districts but with other layers of government. So I think as we continue the discussion, and wherever this issue goes in Indianapolis, school districts might want to be a part of the discussion.

QUESTION: What do you think about John's idea about giving the county some control over schools?

PADDOCK: I guess my concern is where the funding is going to go. We have our own school governments, our board of trustees. I think that's worked relatively well. I've heard some complaints about elected vs. appointed school board members. (Electing members) is a relatively new thing, we've only done it about the last 15 years. In my view, I like the accountability. Yes, it politicizes the school board a little bit. I had to go out and campaign and raise money like Paul Helmke or Paula Hughes or anybody else did. But I'm also directly accountable to the people, and I'll stand for election, perhaps, on my record. I think that the way it's set up is really a pretty good situation.

MARILYN MORAN TOWNSEND: I'm in favor of structural modernization. As I read through the editorials and reports over the last week, one thing that struck me was that, perhaps the subject needed to be re-centered, from "consolidation," which may very well be a polarizing word, to "modernizing."

And I put the adjective "structural" in front of that, because my experience with Invent Tomorrow is that when the community stakeholders step down and identify what the key needs were that we needed to do as a community, the No. 1 deficit that was identified by the National League of Cities and the community survey was that we don't play well together. And that affected all levels of the community government as well as the private sector.

The government was certainly the key area of focus. The result of that, I think, has been some very good will, activity to create collaboration between people and units of government. The challenge of that, however, is that its longevity is based entirely on the individuals doing it.

So I like the idea of structural modernization. I think the stars are aligning for that to happen. I just reviewed the format for the new economic report card that the Indiana Chamber sends out each year, and a key part of the report card includes recommendations. And one of the recommendations is exactly what John is describing, that at state level we enable local counties to modernize. And I think the discussion is being replicated around the state, and I know statewide organizations are also going to be advocating for that. So I think this is a good time to be having this conversation.

Roundtable, Part 2

QUESTION: One of the fears that seems to surface about consolidated government is that "the city is just trying to take over the county." But what I'm hearing here today is that the county could be stronger, that what we might think of as the normal city government that might disappear. Is that right?

HELKME: One idea that gets talked about sometimes is the idea that instead of having the "city take over the county," have the "county take over the city." I even had one fellow at one time say we should dissolve the city boundaries. That's not a bad idea in the sense of getting people to think about what the issues are -- if all of a sudden the city of Fort Wayne as a jurisdictional unit is dissolved.

I mean here, if you live in the city you're also in the county. You're part of city government, you're electing city government and paying for it as well as county government, unlike some states where a city can be in a county and not have any overlap. In Virginia, the city of Richmond isn't part of the county. So you dissolve the city and then all of a sudden, countywide, we would have to pay for planning departments and highway departments and policing departments, and the commissioners and the county council would have all those responsibilities.

Obviously, this would be a bit of a headache in the transition, given the tax freeze and other things. All of a sudden, you know, if county government or central government for 667 square miles that we call Allen County, if those were the responsibilities for their government, I think all of a sudden people would start asking: Is this the best way to run it? Did we really want the executive branch to be a three-headed executive branch, and do we want the legislative branch to be the same three people? And do we want our council to be just a finance committee, or do we want it to be a legislative body? Or do we want to elect what in the old city government was an appointed controller, an appointed chief of police and other things? And you'd have those discussions and maybe end up getting where we want to go.

It might still end up looking like the city taking over the county. But you'd come from a different perspective and raise the same sorts of questions. I don't think the discussion usually phrases it that way, and that's one of the things that scares people off. They see it as the county being subsumed, where it could just be that the county is taking over the city.

TOWNSEND: It doesn't necessarily always mean consolidation. In some cases, it may mean we need more people involved in certain activities, so that's why I like the idea of thinking about this as modernizing government, not automatically jumping to the assumption that it's consolidating government.

DOWNS: One of the things to think about here is that, no matter if it's the city taking over the county or the county taking over the city or consolidation of certain departments, what this comes down to is just different constituencies. And anybody who's ever run for office knows that quite often the loudest constituencies are the ones you're going to have to listen to because they're the ones who can rule your future in terms of being re-elected.

Sometimes you can stand up to them, sometimes you can't stand up to them, sometimes you can get others to stand up with you, but this all breaks down to constituencies. And whether it's the county that takes over or the city that takes over, there's a whole big bunch of people located inside what is now called the Fort Wayne city limits who will speak very loudly and with a fairly unified voice, given the pattern of neighborhood associations that already exist, the area partnerships that exist. They'll be able to speak very loudly, no matter which way it goes. But Paul's right. Change the directions it's coming from, then maybe people would be willing to talk about it, but you end up talking about the same things.

WYSS: What's really interesting about it is that last budget session (of the General Assembly) we did an awful lot for "northeast Indiana," which is a way that we've been acting the last several years. We formed a northeast delegation; we call it NED. We've all been working together like that. This last year we got the arts building, we got the medical education building, and you can't believe, I had criticism from some legislators that Fort Wayne was getting everything.

HELMKE: There are a lot of different options you can look at. Of course, my favorite is you go back to Madison -- if men were angels, there'd be no need of government. If everyone would just behave and use common sense and treat everybody nice and be good neighbors, then you wouldn't need much government. The reason we establish governments is to do things because we don't use common sense, and we don't always get along, and you need to do some things jointly, which you could do on your own voluntarily if everyone would pitch in. But people don't do that, so you form government to have a bit of a cooperative effort, a coercive effort, a bit more efficient, logical way of dealing with things. So the perfect thing would be "if men were angels," but that's not going to happen.

I was in a discussion one time at LBJ school. We had mayors from around the country, Vice President Gore and some others, talking about how local fits in with the federal-state partnership. We all said we should be more business-like. I said that in my mind, if we were looking at government like business, businesses all over are flattening their organizations. I said, What's the "unnecessary level" in government? If you look at it in a macro sense, it's the states. I didn't mean that totally seriously, but it's another way of looking at things.

It's trying to get people to think, in effect, of city-states, of regions, of central Indiana, northeast Indiana, of northwest Indiana and Chicago. We are, in effect, becoming city-states. At the federal level, they're doing the common defense and raising taxes, and they're doing transportation systems. Most things they can send back in effect to these city-state-type regions (bypassing the state) that are more than a city or a county but are areas that sort of make sense economically. You still have state government that defines your school district for IU and Ohio State or something and in other functions, but you would turn a lot more of the functions to the broader local system.

That got some of the other mayors totally upset -- "It's in the Constitution -- we can't get rid of states" Really? There were only 13 states in the original colonies. Everything else was formed since then.

Sometimes you just need to look at issues differently. I think the next idea, which is sort of what Tom was talking about, is looking at ourselves regionally. In some of the discussions, when you talk about why we form counties and why we have counties of certain size and why we had townships and you translate those needs to the current system, you could make the argument that what the county was 100 years ago or 150 years ago is now what in effect northeast Indiana is. It's an area where you're getting a common news source. In the old days it was the Fort Wayne Journal, the Fort Wayne News, hitting just the 50,000 or so people who lived there. Now papers are distributed multi-county. TV stations and radio stations are all multi-county. People come in to shop at the mall for the weekend, whereas in the old days they went to the farmers market downtown.

A lot of the same systems are now a multi-county thing, and maybe part of what we should do is look at saying, "Why do we need 92 counties? Why can't we organize, in effect, county government or some kind of local government on a broader scale?" It gets into the sort of thing I've talked about before. Fort Wayne is really the capital of northeast Indiana. What's good for Whitley County and Kosciusko County can be good for us if you look at it in a regional sense. That's what Indianapolis and Marion County are trying to do is to change the outlook. Unigov made sense for them for 30 years, but now it's too constrictive.

If you deal with Allen County on its own, I find that one of the things that makes the most sense is just to say that you need a single executive and you need a single legislature. Whether you're electing some of these other offices or not is less important than saying you've got one person that's the executive for the region. And when you talk to the folks in Indianapolis that are involved, that's what the most important thing was. It was speaking with one voice.

It's not that the city's right and the county's wrong or the county's right and the city's wrong, it's that there's no mechanism for saying, "Here's what our policy is, right or wrong," and then pushing it. We have this view on security and that view on security; this view and that view on every other issue. Maybe 95 percent of the time they're the same view. But where there are different views, there is no mechanism to say we in the community are going to do it this way. One of the simplest things, if you think about it, might be just elect a single person, call him or her mayor or commissioner -- or judge like they do in Kentucky. Have the council broad enough with districts and at-larges that it's representing the different groups. And then figure out again whether you want the assessors and the clerks and the other things elected or not. Just deal with it that way.

How do you get to something like that? You've obviously got to get some changes in the legislature, whether it's charter changes or a constitutional convention or home rule, to allow us to do things. But I think that if we move toward a goal like that, it might make the most sense.

One idea is that townships are probably unnecessary, I haven't done the research lately, but I think I saw someplace where the commissioners have authority over township boundary lines. I had this idea once that what the commissioners ought to do is create one township. Call it Wayne Township or whatever you want, then in effect we could dissolve city government, cut county government back down to the small level and give the township trustee the authority to do things, and you really end up at the same place. It'd be the township taking over.

FISHERING: The problem you get into with that or any of the farmer-oriented issues, and which was addressed in Kentucky very cleverly, is that the farmer that lives in Scipio Township does not want to pay poor relief on a property tax basis for the people who live in Wayne Township. That's all there is to it. And so any system you design has to pay for base services with property taxes and pay for everything else with an income tax. What they did in Lexington is that they lowered property tax across the board and instituted an income tax. Farmers love income taxes.

HELMKE: The tax issue, I think, has always been one of the major barriers. People don't care what group they're in, they just want . . .

WEISS: But given the flexibility, you can go ahead and use that discussion point. Right now you don't have that flexibility. Which is what the issue's all about.

HELMKE: Lexington and Fayette County have always been a better model (for Fort Wayne and Allen County) than Indianapolis and Marion County. Rural and urban in the same county. Part of their transition in Kentucky was not having a uniform tax. There's the urban tax, the general tax and there's sort of a transitional area. I think when people understand that, or if they would understand that, there'd be a lot more openness toward a discussion on this.

FISHERING: And that goes back to the taxing-district discussions we used to have.

HELMKE: The system we have now is the Jacksonian model from the populist period of the 1840s, where they said, "Let's elect everybody." But in the real world, just as people don't know what township they're in, most of them, unless Mike Ternet gets in trouble, don't know who the assessor is and don't have the slightest idea who a lot of the other elected officials are.

FISHERING: I would like to point out, there is one model currently the commissioners pushed 15 years ago, and that's the Maumee River Basin Commission, which is multiple-county, has a variety of authority. But it was tough because we ended up having to give everyone equal votes on it regardless of population. It's more like a state organization.

At least it's a preliminary step toward the regional. But I'll guarantee if you think it's tough to get the farmers in Allen County to go along with some sort of new system, getting Whitley County to go along would be even harder. If you start from scratch and you do a state's version on some of the regional stuff, for instance, a pure-population voting power version, they'd go for it, and the Maumee River Basin Commission has worked fairly well.

HELMKE: Part of the bottom line to get to anything, there needs to be more authority coming back to the local governments to help rebut these things, then get a group together and try to decide what it's going to be. And, as Tom knows, that's the tough part.

PAULA HUGHES: To me, it comes down to relevant goals for an ideal government. Very clearly we have to accept that there is something broken in the way our government is functioning in Allen County right now. We need a relevant goal for reduction of elected offices. I agree that we need checks and balances, but I disagree with doing that through the voting process is the best way. One thing I haven't heard today is checks and balances for the oversight of all taxing authorities -- all those appointed boards that have taxing authorities. I think that will need to be addressed if we create a charter government.

And tying on to what Paul was referencing, a unified leadership vision or mission -- to me that is one of the most obvious reasons for wanting any kind of revised local government structure. We struggle with that in this community because of multiple elected offices, or a multitude of personalities. Even if you agree on 95 percent of the things, whether or not you've actually communicated the fact that you agree on those things it's a whole nother ball of wax.

And currently, this is a disenfranchised rural population. How do we bring them in? I disagree about I disagree about completely eliminating the township level, because I think that is the one direct connection for some of those more rural areas. How do we empower that connection to the leadership? County council has four districts, but they're so broad. There's no way for me to really, truly represent the whole range of my district.

Roundtable, Part 3

WYSS: You say that, and I've always thought the greatest jobs I've had in my life were the county council at large and the state senate, because I don't really have to be parochial. I have a district, but I was at-large when I was in the county, and if a farmer had a problem, I tried to address his problem. If the inner city had a problem, I tried to address that. I'm very fortunate. I represent a very small district. I can be so flexible on the issues; I don't have to be so darned parochial. It's really interesting when we were talking about this -- although it's heresy to be talking about this -- we have the same problem on the state level, too, because I personally think the attorney general ought to work for the governor, the department of education ought to work for the governor.

This flexibility thing, and again, going back to what I said earlier about the business part of it, the best business is the business that's flexible. They can move quickly, and, I don't know, maybe that's not the way it's supposed to be in government, but when you have all these barriers between you, within the city and county, you can't be flexible. You can't operate fast. I think that's the problem you get into, whether it's in economic development or anything else.

PADDOCK: I think one of the things that just scares the daylights out of people is when you and use the term "Unigov." I know that's really more akin to Indianapolis, but we use that -- perjoratively, anyway -- in our discussions. I think one of the things that we can point to is that there has been a little bit of modernization -- I also like that term better than consolidation -- and the biggest thing has been in economic development. If the economy were improving, if it were good right now, I think that would be quite a success story. That does show that the city and the county can work together. If we could point to some more examples like that, where we actually have done some modernization and actually have had some real results.

As far as efficiency, if you had one county elected leader rather than three, but that's not going to happen anytime soon. My question is, what can we take on now? What is the next piece or the biggest chunk that we can take forward through state legislation? It's been kind of hinted here that things are aligning, that people's attitudes are evolving, if you don't use the term Unigov. People realize that government needs to be more accountable, that we have less resources. What could we take on, let's say, in the next session or in 2005 that could be a good example?

WYSS: First of all, Unigov, the reason it's so ugly, is because Unigov was designed to make the Republican Party dominant in Indianapolis. That's why, though, at the same time, Indianapolis has been able to move forward with the things that they've done with the pro teams, with Circle Center Mall, all of these other things that they've done. But at the same time, because of the way it was put together wrongly -- I don't know how many cities you've got inside there ("four," an unidentified voice says), but because of that, it's so convoluted that now, all of a sudden, everybody's moving out, and it's becoming, everybody is moving to Hamilton and Boone and Hendricks and all the other counties around there.

What can be done? I think it would be difficult. As I sit here today, I think it's going to be extremely difficult to get anything done in 2004. The best thing is that maybe there can be some decision between people, as to whether 190 (the failed bill for charter government in Allen County) is still the version or this could be cleaned up, and this could be introduced, so that we could get people talking about it. Maybe that's the thing that we can do. Whether it can be done in 2005 is a matter of whether or not you can get people to understand what you're trying to do and get everybody on the same page that you really want to proceed this way.

QUESTION: Would it make any difference if we could show Indianapolis that there are a lot of people here who want to do some things?

WYSS: I don't think it's just Indianapolis. Consider Daylight Savings Time.

It is killed by all the guys from northwest Indiana. Chet Dobis (sp?), who is the House Speaker Pro Tem, told me specifically that the reason we will fight it is that we would have to be to Indianapolis for committee meetings one hour early. Personally, on Daylight Saving Time, I could care less. I just want Indiana to be on the same thing, whether it's Central Standard or Daylight Savings or whatever.

When you get that kind of logic or that kind of an attitude, and you've got all these people who represent rural areas, you've got to be able to convince them that this legislation is "may" legislation; it doesn't mean you "have" to do it. So you have to get that by them first, and then you just have to get other people in other areas to agree with you.

HELMKE: That's why I think the Daylight Savings point is probably a legitimate one, because what scares people is the state saying you've got to all fit into this time zone, when for some people, because of where they're located, it just doesn't fit. Right now, what we've got is legislation that fits us all in the same sort of boxes in terms of governmental structure -- except for Indianapolis and some variations in a couple of other places -- so basically we've got the same structure they've got down in Scott County: three commissioners and a city. There are different needs. There have been some adjustments. I've worked there. I remind people that I worked for county government for 14 years before I did city government. Part of the problem, as Bill said, was that the city wasn't annexing, so we had these urban areas. I feel like one of the most fascinating county council meetings I ever went to was the one, I think it was in 78 or 79, when they voted to make the commissioners full-time. When you look back on it, that was a significant step. Before 78 or 79, the commissioners were all part-time. They'd just come into the office occasionally.

You had a growing urban area. And I guess the other thing that I remember is that I was doing work for the county highway department, and Arlington Park was concerned that county highway wasn't fixing their curbs the way they liked. The problem was, Arlington Park was expecting city street department standards and work from the county highway department. But the county highway department was used to building straight roads, chip and seal.

So the county government started to go to full-time commissioners and started to do different things to deal with the unincorporated urban government they had there. That made sense probably at some level in the 70s and the 80s. The catch is that now that the city does these annexations, whether it still makes sense and whether the county ought to be rethinking what they did, what was logical before. You look at the fact that, I think it's 65 percent or whatever of the county's budget is now the criminal justice system.

That's such a huge chunk of government, and that is a unified government. We don't have city courts. If 65 percent of the budget or whatever is the courts system, and then the urbanized area is more and more in the city limits, or will be when the Aboite, the southwest annexation, goes through, what does the rest of the county government do? I know what it does, but is it structured the best way to handle what its responsibilities are?

WYSS: That issue, the criminal justice system, highlights something very important to what we're talking about here. In 1991, Ed Pease, who eventually became a congressman, had the bill and carried it all the way to end, and that was to make the criminal justice system state-funded. You know who killed it? The Indiana Association of Commissioners. You know why? They were going to lose control.

HELKME: That's the biggest chunk of the budget.

FISHERING: Let me take one shot at Paul and the city, so they don't think we're all just in love here. The city design is a 1900s design. It's no brilliant design in and of itself. And Paul's quite right, in the early 70s, the commissioners went to full-time, and that's because they're truly the public works board for the county. The city has its own public works board. All we're missing is the mayor. Other than that, our system, from that standpoint, is designed just like the city. We just have a mayor above us.

From that standpoint, it's interesting because our system is probably more efficient than the city's. We have one less person running that side than the city does. But again, that doesn't mean that the system -- again, to get back to Lexington -- Lexington is more of a parliamentary system. Their people appoint a county director who reports to the mayor but can't be hired or fired by the mayor, so he or she really runs the show. That system takes both the mayors and the commissioners out of the mix.

Roundtable, Part 4

(There was a brief conversation on the fact that the state Supreme Court has ruled that the General Assembly can no longer pass special legislation affecting just one city or county of the state.)

HELMKE: I think that's where they can say that as long as it has been signed off of by the County Council the County Commissioners and the city, in the past, the legislature didn't care, we could just in Allen County and go down to the legislature. In the past, the legislature did not care. Now it is going to be tougher because everyone is going to see this as it as, "You can't write it Allen County only," so they are going to be afraid to give any power up unless the legislature is willing to give a broader definition of home rule powers back to locals.

PADDOCK: Tom, how does state statute address . . . if I'm adding my numbers up right, we're about 220,000. With Aboite township coming in Jan. 1, 2006, we could get to 250,000. Don't we automatically become by state statue a first-class city, and aren't there a number of things . . .

HELMKE: But you don't automatically become a consolidated city . . .

PADDOCK: What kinds of options are given to a city that becomes 250,000 . . . ?

DOWNS: This has actually been discussed inside the city government, what happens when the magic 250 gets breached, and it will happen with the southwest annexation, and so there has been talk of going to speak with legislators to figure out what parts of Unigov do we have to comply with, don't comply. And people have said, well, probably what's going to happen is that they'll just bump the number up to 300,000, so that Fort Wayne won't be a first-class city. It will still just be Indianapolis, and Fort Wayne will still be . . .

HELMKE: Really what needs to be done is to look to see what the legislation provided before Unigrow got adopted, because that's in effect what we would have.

STAFFORD: Geoff made a statement earlier that we hear quite frequently: Don't in any way call this Unigov. We have kind of this statewide disdain for Unigov, and maybe part of it was the process by which it came into being. It was the only consolidation in the nation I'm aware of that wasn't the result of a referendum.

But why are we all so down on Indianapolis? Take a look at the last 30 years and which geographical portions of this state have done relatively less poorly compared to the rest of the nation, and Indianapolis sticks out as the one success story in the state. Is there any correlation to what they did with their decision- making processes and the manner in which they have been able to better compete economically than the rest of the state has?

WYSS: I definitely agree that is what has given them the advantage . . .

FISHERING: My opinion is that the state spending every dime in Indianapolis makes it twice as competitive. If they'd spend the same percentage of money up here, we may not do quite as well, but I don't think there would be quite as significant a difference.

HUGHES: But does the state spends more money in Indianapolis, because Indianapolis has its act together and has a unified voice when they go to legislature and ask for things?

HELMKE: It is the state capital . . .

WYSS: . . . and you can get a legislator there in a heartbeat.

DOWNS: It's the state capital -- you can always make the argument that our state capital has to look good even if the rest of the state doesn't. It's not just a matter of Unigov, because it's not just the city of Indianapolis going through the legislature, it's the delegates from the state legislature going to the state legislature themselves. So I don't want to bad-mouth Indianapolis. I am with John, Indianapolis has done quite well compared to the rest of the state. But at the same capital.

TOWNSEND: Maybe another way to ask the question: Is our current form of government hindering us with the state and if so, how?

HELMKE: I think it does. We have managed to work together and patch things through when we need to. We do so many of these things where we get it together, but I think because of the way we are structured we are a step slower to respond to opportunities and just a step slower to respond to crises. I am not saying who is right and who is wrong. Are things fitting together? If it is trying to attract a business, and even though we have the Alliance set up, the funding and the approval still need to come through the different bodies. It's just another step that is slower, and when you are in a competitive marketplace, that step slower, even though we have done well, means that we are missing out on some things and we taking some hits we don't need. I think we can do a lot better.

DOWNS: I will take issue with Paul. I am not saying I am opposed to consolidation, in fact I think there are a lot of things that could be consolidated to provide better service to the taxpayers, and that's the most important thing. We can talk all we want about these other things, but the bottom line is that if the taxpayers are not getting the services they want or need than it doesn't matter whether it is county or city . . . it's irrelevant.

When we have needed things, whether it's the most recent session -- and you all (in the area's legislative delegation ) deserve a lot of credit for bringing a lot of good back to northeast Indiana -- my point is the government's structure didn't keep us from doing that. You managed to get into the positions to do that. You managed to develop the right relationships to do that. Whether we had one government up here, two governments up here, in many respects that wouldn't matter, because when we agree we need something, we manage to accomplish it.

If you go back -- once again, I'm going to get historical on everyone -- if you go back and look at the way the state of Indiana developed, we developed in what most would consider the traditionalistic political culture. Which means you got involved in politics to cover your own hiney, not necessarily because you thought government was supposed to do good. And if you go even further down the state when we first developed, you were in government because you thought you could control things.

Fort Wayne, Allen County and basically almost everything but Indianapolis, still has a very traditionalistic political culture. We are not a state that believes that government is there to do good and government should be getting involved in people's lives. That is not the way we think here. And so if you go in with the mind-set that just changing the structure of government is going to create this difference, it is not going to happen.

Indianapolis manages to succeed in part because they are a metropolitan area, I believe it's the 15th largest city in the United States. They attract people from other parts of the country. They have a diversity in their political culture now, and they are willing to look at those other things. If we are still traditionalistic in our views, about what government is and should be, then these discussions . . . make perfect sense, except that we are in northeast Indiana. They aren't going to happen, either because the legislature won't do them, or we won't do them locally. So if we are talking about doing something productive, then let's talk about what departments can be combined -- parks departments, emergency communication departments, those sorts of things, economic development with the Alliance. Let's continue to look at those things that can be done and are viewed as acceptable by our political culture.

QUESTION: We do have a traditional sense of government. But economic development seems to be one area where people might be changing, with things like the Alliance. Is that enough? or does the business community think there should be just one set of rules when they're dealing with government?

TOWNSEND: Oh, yes. I am going take issue with what Andy said. I don't think the success our delegation was enabled by our government. I go back to the fact that it was the good will of a group of good leaders coming together for a common vision. It wasn't because we are structured that way. We are entirely in a yin and yang from time to time as to whether or not people were playing well together, not because we are structured around any sort of common mission.

And similarly then, economic development is so much more today than just attracting businesses. So the effort we've made with the Economic alliance is important, and it also does goes beyond our county boundaries in terms of challenges. But our biggest challenge in this county, and in this region, is that we have typically had horrible lack of cooperation with the state. So we lose tons of deals here because the state does not play well with our county.

It's so much more than just the attraction of businesses. It's the growth of the businesses that are here. It's certainly very evident in the last six months, with the number of major headquarters leaving, that economic development is so much more than growing businesses -- starting businesses and growing businesses -- than it is attracting businesses. So the Alliance deals with one part of it that is important, but it doesn't deal with business regulation, environmental regulation, all sorts of other issues, taxation issues.

Business has to deal with a myriad of government areas. I remember a conversation with Ben Eisbart about this. He was talking about how he had been looking from a business point of view at what they were doing in Florida. They just buttoned an entire package, and they just walked everything through. Okalahoma does the same thing.

We don't have that sort of thing, unless again we've had government leaders who would come together on a goodwill basis to work together for a particular project. What happens then, especially when we think of the voice of people and our constituents, is the little guys get horrible service. And they go, "It's just too much trouble to do business here," so they just leave.

WYSS: We had a situation where we needed to get a business to the Department of Commerce. You develop these relationships -- I just walked down to the lieutenant governor's office and told him what the situation was; it was resolved. This is one of the reasons we're addressing the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, to try to figure out what we are doing down there that is not really the thing we need to be for the state. You know it is really funny, we are talking about something that is really local and having all these problems. But again, we have it from the state level too. We are so convoluted sometimes in this state.

HELMKE: Let me respond briefly to the combine-the-department type of thing. Because over the last 30 years that has been talked about a lot, and it has never gone anywhere. There are so many logical ones to combine. And that is why I think we sometimes we lose, if that becomes the focus of the conversation, the overall point, which is that you really need a single executive and a single legislative group.

And there are a lot of problems that come with just looking at the combinations. One is under the state's tax structure, you get the problems we had when we combined boards of health and the the building departments. How does that fit with a (tax) freeze situation? The other problem you get, when you say let's do a city and county combination, where the city pays, say, half and the county pays half -- since I live in the city and I pay city taxes and county taxes, that means I am paying twice. And that doesn't make sense, either. So a lot of these partnership type things look like ways that makes me as a city resident pay twice, unless it is structured where everybody is paying for the system, and then you run into the tax freeze issues and the control issues.

HUGHES: But currently, the way county finances are going, that is not an accurate statement. We are talking about economic development deals, and the county is funding those with CEDIT, which is not shared. So the whole issue of city taxpayers paying twice is moot, because the county participates out of income tax that has already been divided.

FISHERING: All the existing combinations have been done without double taxing -- board of health, building departments, airport service, special districts where they took it out of the city tax and put it across the county as a whole. Doing any of those now becomes difficult because you really need to get an exception, and that is not impossible to do, but you do need an exception to what is going. And what typically happens is that they move some of the (tax) freeze numbers around a bit.

The problem in the current ones -- communication is a good example -- arguably you could do it the way we are discussing it, but the problem is the city people need a lot more communication than the county people do. But I don't think necessarily it is a big problem, if you give the county the tax levy freedom to cover it. That gets back to the thing I said earlier, no matter what you do, you have to give us flexibility, and Tom's charter did not give us any flexibility in the freeze or in the income tax.

And the only way you can get anything to fly is that you have to tell the farmers that is coming out of the income tax. Because if you tell them it is coming out of property tax, they will go ballistic, and the Farm Bureau will be against it, and Tom knows how tough it can be. We may only have 20,000 farmers in Allen County, but when they start lining up across the state . . .

Roundtable, Part 5

WYSS: I guess when you go back to the 93 bill (on charter government) and again Paul was and John was trying to get this thing worked out, what kind of input did we have from county on what we were trying to do on the bill?

HELMKE: They didn't like it.

WYSS: What they are saying might be perfectly valid. It may be exactly right, but how much did they try to help us so we could make that bill OK? All my wife's family out in the Woodburn area were calling me up and raising hell because Squadrito and Worman were out there telling them that I wanted to make Paul Helmke mayor of Allen County, by God.

HUGHES: Andy touched off something with when we talking about two reasons to consolidate government or charter government.

One is efficiencies, financial efficiencies, fiscal efficiencies. And the other is unified leadership. And you are right, we can consolidate departments, but there aren't whole a lot of departments. Parks and rec, homeland security, can have duplication, but there is not going to be any great cost savings by any kind of mass consolidation, and I have a problem with selling it to anybody on that basis because I just don't think it is going to happen. I think the whole justice system is just too big a part of the county's budget, and if we eliminate all these offices, the staffing levels, particularly the assessor office, comes to mind. That will happen with efficiencies, but you don't have to consolidate the government to do that. To me there are much more pressing issues that require leadership.

WYSS: Efficiencies are a cost savings. Those are the kinds of things that come out, the permit process, you make that so that it's countywide, so that nobody has to worry where the line is or whatever. All of those things come together to really help you grow because they make it easier for businesses to settle here, to build here to do whatever they have to do.

TOWNSEND: But isn't that more of a unified vision, that everybody has the same goal of making it a vision?

WYSS: What I am saying is, consolidations, when you say you can't save money, there are certain things that are efficiencies that come out of the consolidation. I could care less if some other county around us makes themselves easy to deal with whether you're a taxpayer or whether you are an individual or whether you are a business. I want it to be here. I want to see Fort Wayne become the next Indianapolis for bringing everybody back into the county.

TOWNSEND: That would be a third thing, efficiency for the end users. Is that what you are.

WYSS: Everybody, whether it would be the business taxpayer or the individual taxpayer or business entity.

DOWNS: But you see, Paul, that was my point. You are right. You just look at duplication of services -- it is a limited number of departments. If you look at places where -- I think when I was talking with Kevin (Kilbane, News-Sentinel reporter) I mentioned that someone actually called me up that was outside of city limits and said hey there is water out in front of my house -- who do I call?. And he had a fire hydrant in front of his house. And I said, "Do you get a city utilities bill?" and he said no he gets an Aqua- Source bill. I said call AquaSource, they will come out and fix it.

When people have a problem, they just want to know they can call one number. When people have a problem, they don't want to stop and think about it, they just want a number. But if we are really primarily interested in providing that sort of efficiency, then one could make the argument that we just need a 24-hour phone number.

TOWNSEND:Let me tell you a story. I am on Illinois Road, and I get ready to turn on my business street, Lawrence Drive, which had only recently at that point been annexed into the city, and my street is closed for road construction, so I pull over into Meijers and I get on my cell phone and I go, "I wonder who I call here."

We recently got annexed into the city, so I called the city street department. They looked it up and said, no, that is a county project, and so they didn't have a number, of course. So then I got the number to call the county highway department, and after a long time they said they think it is the state highway project because it is (Highway) 14, so I call the state, they say no, it is the city project, I call the city back, and they say I need to call Brooks Construction.

HUGHES: But I think we need to talk about the notion out there that any kind of consolidation is going to lower the property tax, so that is a compelling reason, and I want to dispel that effect.

STAFFORD: If we have so many opportunities for consolidating departments, why can't we bring ourselves to make even the most modest changes?

DOWNS: Paul said shared leadership, and I always say this, and in this room I am talking with Republicans and Democrats about local problems. There is no Republican way to fill a pothole, there is no Democratic way to fill a pothole.

If people want to be daring and show that sort of leadership, they should be able to say, "You know what? This department does make sense to combine," and then sit down and in good faith go through those negotiations. But what ends up happening is that either someone is up for election and they need to make some bones with somebody else, or somebody said something about somebody else and so that personality conflict comes into play.

And I am not bashing the county because there are three executives, but you make the mistake of talking to the wrong one first and then the one of the other ones gets upset with you; sometimes being a leader is saying you are right, we cannot combine these two departments and this is no reflection on the current mayor, the former mayor, current commissioners, former commissioners. Personality comes into it.

HELMKE: Personality definitely is part of it.

DOWNS: And election process.

HELMKE: It's kind of like, we love articles that say these are tough things to do in a election year. Three out of every four years is an election year! I mean, there is only one out of every four years that is not an election year, and the way people campaign anymore, those are becoming election years.

And why do we have so many election years? It is because we have so many elected officials and so many different layers of government.

TOWNSEND: I was struck by how you said we have 100 elected officials in Allen County. We all have been laughing about 100 candidates on the ballot in California. I don't know what the number is. I didn't see it in any of your articles. But I do remember hearing that we have significantly more elected officials in Indiana than California does.

HELMKE: We have like 167 in the county.

WYSS: And 1008 townships (in the state).

DOWNS: As an election board member, in the off-year elections, in 2002, it was just ridiculous watching those two parties trying to fill all the ballots. It doesn't matter which party you're talking about; nobody can fill all those spots.

HELMKE: A quick thing about schools. My memory is that the schools almost consolidated into a single school district back in the early 60s after the consolidation law went through. It was a choice, and the township trustees had to have some sort of a joint vote and lost by one vote of having a single school system.

PADDOCK: That crossed by my mind and we may not want to veer off in that direction, but Andy kind of goaded me into it. Take a look at the map of Fort Wayne Community Schools, and there is not much rhyme or reason to it except that it does follow a township.

HELMKE: It was a city boundary line, plus the two townships, plus St. Joe township that did join in, and they excluded Adams township which opted out.

PADDOCK: It doesn't make much sense that urban schools to the east of Anthony Boulevard are in East Allen and the rest which are a couple of blocks away in the Fort Wayne Community Schools. Or maybe even that what the Southwest Allen County Schools, one of them is closed, is only a mile or two from Pleasant Center, which is near the airport. Well, we know the answer, but I don't know that it makes much rhyme or reason what we have. That has bothered me since I started campaigning for this job. What was the logic in having four school systems where Southwest has only one high school, Northwest has just one?

HELMKE: Then you have East Allen, which has five high schools, which probably should just have three based on population. Then you have Fort Wayne, which has six high schools, which should probably only have five based on population. But there are the budgets, tax raising, buses, developing transportation plans. I mean, you know I am catching enough flack with everything else going on. Nothing makes sense.

PADDOCK: But it certainly come to light for me, as someone on the job for eight months, when we have just go in there, jumping into a fire, having to cut $17 million. It seems like with a different geographical system we could probably have done a better job, if we didn't draw our boundaries exactly where they were.

QUESTION: One thing I would like to get everybody to talk about, is that if we wanted to get a group together locally to show each other we can play nice together and to show that we are serious, who should be in that group? Who should call them together, how should it work?

TOWNSEND: I think it should be Invent Tomorrow, because Invent Tomorrow took this issue on as it was identified by the community when all the stakeholders got together. I think it is considered a pretty neutral table, and it really has three focuses, to look at the community issues and identify what those are and if there is someone that can deal with it and leads support. And there are groups in the community that are all operating in separate silos, and we can bring them together. So support, connect and create are the three visionary areas. So I think we can be a good table for this as we have that discussion and it would be interested in considering it.

Roundtable,Part 6

HELMKE: Actually, when Tom and I were doing Fort Wayne Future, John spoke way back when. That's how I got into the issue somewhat. But I look at the Indianapolis model, and I felt we were pushing from Fort Wayne Future, an outside-group type of thing. And that would get some mentions, but not far enough. One of the reasons I ran for mayor was to try it from the inside, and that didn't get very far, either. Although the annexations, I think, helped the mind set.

Sometimes I think I think I should run for county office to help push it. I think it takes a combination of folks inside city government, inside county government and the community at large that are pushing it to get it done. We tried different variations on the city side.

We tried a lot of versions. We had this Hudson Institute report, they had some ideas; then we had the bills that Tom introduced; then we had the Consensus Committee. And you learn something from each version. Invent Tomorrow's more like a Fort Wayne Future model than a Consensus Committee model.

The media playing a major role is a crucial part of it. Most people aren't going to list this as a top priority. With all the polling that's been done over the years, people don't list it as a top priority. But it's one that they are interested in. If you do more of a focus-group approach, they realize the importance of it but, again, it's always going to fall behind safety and jobs and other things, not forgetting that this can contribute to the safety issue and jobs issue and the tax issue.

WYSS: When you're talking about the people in the community, I think back over the years, the business community today is a hell of a lot different than it was 15 years ago. You don't have the Paul Shafers and the Dick Doermers and the Ian Rollands and all of these other guys who could ... It wasn't so much they had political clout -- well, I guess it was, because they could say something like "Hey, you know . . ."

STAFFORD: There are a lot within this room -- small businesses who have the potential.

WYSS: But a lot of businesses today, I think part of it is that they haven't been plugged into things.

DOWNS: I think part of the issue is, they started their business in their basement or their garage someplace and they've grown it into something that's fairly impressive. Then they go to a meeting and they see a couple of people who are elected officials, who will start squabbling over something that is really completely irrelevant to the provision of services or the delivery of a product that government has to offer, and they say Well this is silly, Can't you get past that? Then they see they can't get past it. "Oh, forget it. I'm going to go do something else."

This is not just something here, there are plenty of people throughout the country. This is one of the biggest causes of voter apathy. You have people who are still involved in PTA, their local chamber of commerce, and all the other civic organizations, and they just say "You know, I'm not even going to vote because Indiana is going to have to deal with whichever jerk gets elected . . ."

HELMKE The "Don't vote, it just encourages them" idea.

DOWNS: "I'm not gonna vote. I'm going to show up and get done what I need to get done, but I'm not gonna get into that because it's not productive."

QUESTION: Can I ask a naive question about consolidated departments? A little bit ago Paul said the excuse was, "Well every year's an election year, so we can't consolidate the departments because . . ." I would think that politicians might, since there is more interest in consolidation of departments, and it's very easy to explain, want to do this. Why would that not be considered a political feather in your cap if you completed that?

DOWNS: I'll take a stab at it. It doesn't rank high enough. There are, in Fort Wayne traditionally, there are three issues, and sometimes just one key issue. If you aren't singing that song, it just doesn't matter. You're not going to get the reach that you need with a bunch of individual issues. You're talking about needing to have a campaign of $3-$5 million if you're going to run on all of these things that are good, and people will agree with you, but it appeals to just this little sliver of the community.

And so then you need to appeal to this sliver and this sliver and this sliver, and before you know it, you've run up the cost of the campaign in terms of dollars and dollars, and it's just not feasible for our community. So you do what all politicians do, and that's you focus on the issues that you know people care about, and you win based on those.

HUGHES: Also, I think that it's one thing as a campaign platform issue, but there's not been the opportunity to do it on a large enough scale that people recognize it.

WYSS: But if you're running for office, or you're in an office, the last thing you want to do is offend voters. So what you do is, it's like I've always said, the easiest vote I can have in the General Assembly is a "No" vote. I don't have to really explain it. I voted against it. There was a part of that legislation that was really bad, and they wouldn't change it, so I voted against it.

But, if you vote for something, you damn well better know all of these little things that I never know of.

HELMKE: It's the thing I've always said about the local community. Everyone here thinks they have a veto on things. Everyone here sort of waits around suspiciously, and when they hear an idea, they don't like something about it, it's, "I'll put my veto in." And that's what happens all the time. So any new idea, or any change, someone's gonna veto it.

DOWNS: You can literally stop anything in this town with about 20 interested people, because you . . .

HELMKE: Probably less.

DOWNS: I'm going high. You take 20 people and you can stop anything from happening.

HELMKE: And the opposite. To try to push something . . . there were some things I pushed . . . it takes a lot of time, effort, headache.