Bryan Corbin, writing for the Evansville Courier Press, has an article on legislative efforts with respect to the Shepard-Kernan local government restructuring plan;
A Southwestern Indiana lawmaker, Rep. Dave Crooks, is introducing a bill that would assign all 27 Kernan-Shepard recommendations to a summer study committee of the Legislature. There isn’t time during the Legislature’s 2008 short session to consider the Kernan-Shepard plan, Crooks said. But a summer study committee would be able to thoroughly explore the ideas in preparation for the 2009 session.
Meanwhile, Senator Mike Delph wants to leap before he looks too hard:
Sen. Mike Delph plans to introduce a bill containing portions of the Kernan-Shepard plan in the 2008 session.
“Whether we get all components of the bill done, that will be for the will of the Legislature. But we at least ought to introduce a vehicle to move forward a discussion of the costs of government,” Delph said.
A short session before a major election year where you have major property tax restructuring as the order of the day? That seems like a particularly bad time to push local government restructuring, particularly where you have only a relatively brief report as a blueprint. To my knowledge, nobody has actually run any numbers to determine how much these proposed changes will supposedly save in the way of tax dollars or what costs we might be looking at in terms of direct restructuring costs or indirect reductions in government services. And moving the restructuring in pieces also seems potentially questionable — you always run the risk of passing the easy stuff while the harder stuff gets defeated, leaving you with an incomplete mess that doesn’t do anybody much good.
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