Indiana House committee endorses township consolidation plan

Townships with low performance evaluations to merge with other townships

(Story Courtesy of Indiana Capital Chronicle)

INDIANAPOLIS (INDIANA CAPTITAL CHRONICLE) — Legislators might have coalesced around a plan for consolidating perhaps hundreds of Indiana’s 1,000+ township governments.

An Indiana House committee on Tuesday endorsed a melding of differing Senate and House bills that supporters said will improve local government efficiency.

The new version of Senate Bill 270 would require townships with low performance evaluations to merge with other townships. The plan would also let city governments take over the township functions when the township is located mostly within the city limits.

Townships taking steps toward mergers under current state law by June 30, 2027, would be exempt from the proposed new procedure that would then begin. It would start the process for mergers taking effect Jan. 1, 2029 — a year later than previously proposed.

Bill author Sen. Rick Niemeyer, R-Lowell, said the delay would give townships facing required consolidations time to make their own merger decisions.

“They can do local meetings back home, decide what township, maybe, they want to merge with, see where they want to go,” Niemeyer told the committee. “I think that’s going to happen a lot. I hope it happens a lot.”

Differing Senate, House approaches

The Indiana Township Association had favored Niemeyer’s approach that based merger requirements upon a points system evaluating township functions. The group opposed the process in House Bill 1315 that required mergers based on population, budget and geography.

Andrew Durham, the association’s associate director, told the Capital Chronicle that it supported the compromise version.

“Our stance has always been about looking at the efficiencies of the units first before making any determination on whatever the reform may be,” said Durham, who is the Center Township trustee in Howard County.

Durham said preliminary estimates are that about 300 townships could face consolidations under the legislation endorsed Tuesday.

A legislative analysis of House Bill 1315, which the House approved earlier this month, estimated about 650 townships could be affected.

The House Local Government Committee voted 11-2 on Tuesday in favor of Senate Bill 270, which is expected to be voted upon by the full House in the coming days. 

If it gains House approval, both the House and the Senate would have to agree on a final version before the legislative session’s scheduled Feb. 27 adjournment.

Long debate over township futures

Indiana’s township officials have long argued for the importance of the services they provide. That work includes providing emergency aid for expenses such as utilities and housing to low-income residents, with some townships also operating fire departments or parks and maintaining old cemeteries.

Critics believe the township system dating to the 1800s is inefficient and that those functions could be better operated by cities or counties. But numerous attempts in the Legislature for major reorganization of Indiana’s townships have failed — dating back to a 2007 report on local government reform headed by former Gov. Joe Kernan and then-Chief Justice Randall Shepard. 

Provisions of the current bill set up an evaluation process overseen by the state’s Department of Local Government Finance. 

The bill specifies that townships would accumulate points based upon factors such as whether it provides emergency aid, operates a fire department or emergency medical services agency, files financial reports on a timely basis and has had candidates in recent township trustee elections.

The more points a township receives the more likely it would be forced to merge.

Among those townships facing mergers, their functions could be taken over by a city or town if at least 80% of its territory and more than half of its population are within the municipality’s limits.

Durham said the township association has been working to find a compromise that improves efficiency at a time when local governments are facing tightening property tax revenue.

“We’ve already had enough people who thought we weren’t needed to be around,” he said of township governments. “It’s not the case everywhere, but there are some ones that need to be reorganized.”