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Dec
27
Township Reform: Fix Whatever Causes 6AM Queue
Filed Under Calumet Township, local government reform, Mary Elgin, township government | Comments Off
Calumet Township Trustee Mary Elgin wrote in the Northwest Indiana Times that township government should be saved and that Calumet Township is doing a great job serving clients. Griffith thinks otherwise and wants out of the township system, but that’s an argument for another time.
One suggestion:
If township government isn’t reformed into a less costly new entity, maybe some changes could be made so that poor people don’t have to line up outside of its offices early in the morning — hours before the township offices are scheduled to open.
People don’t routinely queue up in front of government offices in Indiana in the cold, before the sun rises, waiting for services.
People huddled up — freezing in the wintertime — waiting for hours to get into the Township offices suggests to me that they are fearful that if they don’t get in line early in the morning, they’ll have to spend all day waiting for services. If they didn’t, they’d wait until normal business hours to appear.
Just a reform idea.
H/T to Buzzcut for spotting the op/ed piece.
Dec
11
The Indiana Commission on Local Government Reform has released its awaited report — “Streamlining Local Government. We’ve Got To Stop Governing Like This” — with recommendations on what Indiana should do to make government more efficient and cost effective.
From the report:
Indiana has too many local governments. As Governor Daniels pointed out in his charge to the Commission, ―Indiana has some 2,700 local units of government authorized to levy property taxes.
Governing these units are more than 10,700 elected officials, 1,100 of whom assess property.
Few other states have as much local government.
Because local government dollars are diluted and dispersed into so many layers controlled by so many players, they are not always spent efficiently.
…
We should no longer try to deliver government services under boundaries set according to travel by horseback. That’s no longer efficient in this age of the Internet, interaction and interstates.
