Sweeping Changes to Local Government

Posted Wednesday, December 12, 2007, at 12:08 PM

Local government will likely see drastic changes soon, as Governor Mitch Daniels asked volunteers to serve on the blue ribbon Indiana Commission for Local Government Reform. Over the past several months these members have been working on examining and developing recommendations, and the commission members recently submitted 27 specific recommendations to streamline local government and reduce costs in their final report.

Of course, changes do not come without hardship, and the Commission acknowledges this. In fact, they say sweeping changes will not be easy and write in their report that their recommendations will be "disruptive, even painful, in the short run". Nonetheless, they also write "We've got to stop governing like this."

Some of their recommendations included:

*Establish a single-person elected county chief executive.

*Consolidate emergency public safety dispatch by county or multi-county region.

*Move the funding of child welfare from counties to the state.

*Reorganize school districts to achieve a minimum student population of 2,000.

*Reorganize library systems by county and provide permanent library service for all citizens.

*Prohibit employees of a local government unit from serving as elected officials within the same local government unit.

To learn more, you can read the entire report here:

http://indianalocalgovreform.iu.edu/asse...

Comments
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One of the recomendations was to make the sheriff an apointed possision by the 1 county executive.

This to me sounds bad. What if situations abound with these ideas. I admit they all sound great on the surface but our forefather put most of the county offices in as Checks and Balances for POWER abuse. NOW what I see coming out of Indianapolis IS Power Abuse.

IF as a Sheriff do I kneel to the apointer or to the people?? The way we have it now the People Ultimatley can replace incompetancy--- sometimes that means not having a proffessional in charge--- but most of the time we elect proffessionals anyway.(sooting down one of the reasons for apointing the sheriff)

-- Posted by silerCityDude on Wed, Dec 12, 2007, at 8:58 PM

Useless trivia: Do you know the only person in the county that can arrest the Sheriff? The Coroner.

-- Posted by The Raven on Wed, Dec 12, 2007, at 9:11 PM

and I was told the only person that can arrest a sitting Govenor-- a sheriff

-- Posted by silerCityDude on Thu, Dec 13, 2007, at 9:52 PM