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Analysis By KEVIN NEVERS Here’s a lopsided ratio—18:1. Of the 430 Hoosiers who took the trouble to e-mail or voice-mail their opinion on library consolidation to the Indiana Commission on Local Government Reform (CLGR), 407 of them or nearly 97 percent—by the count of the Chesterton Tribune—opposed it, many of them passionately and eloquently. (For the record, the CLGR said that it received a total of “some 1,500” comments, so almost a third of all Hoosiers who had any opinion at all on local government were prompted to express it under threat of losing local control of their community’s library.) For every person, then, who does want libraries to be consolidated, roughly 18 do not. In an election that’s a landslide. For the CLGR it’s an irrelevance. Recommendation No. 18: “Reorganize library systems by county.” To be sure, we could speculate on the frequency with which the seven members of the CLGR themselves use public libraries. At the pinnacle of their respective professions, they presumably make pretty good salaries and may be content to pay cash on the barrel for their books, DVDs, and CDs. In any case, none of them lives in a city with a population under 70,000 or without a university. Their entertainment choices are wide and varied. So perhaps it never occurred to them to wonder what the farmer who lives in To Hell and Gone Township is going to do when he discovers that he can’t check out the latest Steven King at his local library because the trustees of the county library which swallowed it opted not to invest in costly new materials for the boondockers. In fact, though, the CLGR’s report raises larger—and scarier—issues than even library consolidation. Let’s remind ourselves of some of its salient recommendations: •The establishment of a single-person elected county chief executive, to whose purview would be transferred the responsibility for administering the duties of county auditor, treasurer, recorder, assessor, surveyor, sheriff, and coroner. •The liquidation of township government, whose functions would also be transferred to the purview of that single person. •The creation of a single county-wide body, chaired by the chief executive, to provide all police and fire protection. Show Your Work My math teachers used to tell me, when I took a test, to show my work. Only that way could they know whether I knew what I was doing. The CLGR did not show its work. Actually it seems not to have done any work. In a remarkably fast turnaround, only five months after Gov. Mitch Daniels appointed its members the CLGR issued a slim 46-page report, which includes a bibliography of 16 other reports issued by other commissions—nine of them released no more recently than 2001—but no original research of its own. None, unless you want to use the term “research” very loosely to refer to the 1,500 e-mails and voice-mails which the CLGR solicited from the public, then—at least in the case of library consolidation—chose anyway to ignore. If the CLGR wants to change local government—my local government—beyond all recognition, it needs to offer me more in the way of rationale than the blue-ribbon version of a Cliff Notes book report. I want feasibility studies, cost-benefit analyses, flow charts. I want absolutely the most recent available numbers crunched. And I want those numbers for Porter County, because I don’t live in Lake or LaPorte or Marion counties and what could work there may not here. I also want the CLGR to calculate the hidden costs of reform instead of pretending that there wouldn’t be any: the cost of leasing or building new space for the expanding county bureaucracies; the cost of outfitting that space with office equipment; the cost of selling or otherwise disposing of vacant and obsolete town and township property; the cost of merging township libraries’ incompatible computer systems with county libraries’ systems; the cost—in gas, emissions, and time—of Hoosiers’ driving to county seats to transact business which they once completed easily and quickly in their town or township. Last, I want the CLGR to calculate the average annual savings which a Porter County resident could expect to see on his property-tax bill under the new regime. And I want the CLGR to show its work. Because otherwise the General Assembly is likely to blunder into legislation—as it already shows signs of doing—whose ultimate impact on my tax bill could be comically negligible but on my quality of life unwittingly disastrous. Centralization Ask any Russian of a certain age about the virtues of Soviet centralization: the long lines, the long trips to distant bureaus just to wait in line, the unaccountable apparatchiks, the cronyism and nepotism. Now ask any Chesterton resident who has a complaint about the police presence in his neighborhood whether he wants to drive to Valparaiso to lodge it; any Westchester Township resident burned out of his home and in need of relief whether he wants to drive to Valpo to seek it; any resident of any township at all troubled by his reassessment whether he wants to drive there to dispute it. Finally, ask any resident of Porter County, of any county in Indiana, how much he would actually trust a single elected county chief executive in the place of at least 10 elected officials, from sheriff to treasurer, from coroner to commissioner. An executive with the power to fill the offices formally held by those officials with bureaucrats beholden and answerable solely to him. An executive—just for the sake of argument—with the power to strip a given town of its police officers in order to flood the county seat because that’s where his political base is. Reform doesn't sound very much like reform when it removes the traditional safeguard of the ballot box and replaces it with a system prone to patronage, abuse, and corruption. Government and Business Of course, as the CLGR went about its work it clearly took as its fundamental if unstated premise this one: that government can and should operate like a business. It sounds reasonable enough—and that's what's pernicious about the premise—until you recall two irreducible facts: •Government doesn't have a profit-motive. •Business isn't a democracy. The bottom line of business is profit. No bad thing. When two companies merge, it may make perfect sense to eliminate redundancies, to close branches and cut positions. But towns and townships aren’t redundant branches of the county at all but separate, smaller, nimbler units of government far better positioned than the county ever could be, by virtue of their size and proximity to their constituents, to provide services to those constituents. If government were a business, a county-seat machine of the sort envisioned by the CLGR would be liable to antitrust prosecution. More to the point—though I shouldn’t have to make it—in the U.S. citizens have never enjoyed a greater role in government, a louder voice, a more meaningful vote, than at the local level. Dissolving nearly a dozen elected countywide positions, liquidating the entire township government unit, eliminating communities’ control of their libraries and police and fire departments, and then handing over all of those functions to political appointees in the county seat: a strange reform it would be whose net result is to disenfranchise voters and limit their access to government itself. If the CLGR had been malevolently plotting to silence us into apathy and cynicism by paving over the grassroots, it could have done no better than it did.
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