Two proposed Indiana bills could cause small townships to lose their governing independence.
House Bill 1315 would eliminate townships with populations lower than 6,700 that don’t operate a fire department and don’t meet a “minimum level of emergency financial assistance distribution,” according to Indiana Capital Chronicle.
If 80% or more of a consolidated township’s territory and half of its population lives within a city’s limits, its functions will be taken over by the city.
There are 1,008 townships in Indiana, and according to a legislative analysis, about 650 of them could be forced to consolidate under HB 1315.
Proposed Senate Bill 270 would not use population as a metric, but would instead use performance metrics to consolidate lower performing townships.
Efrat Rosser, Bloomington Township Trustee, said SB 270 would preserve township government while HB 1315 would chip away at it.
She said the possibility of consolidating townships is a recurring theme in Indiana legislation every few years. This may be because many people do not know the purpose of townships, she said.
“You may not know about what townships do until you have to go rely on one to get through a hardship,” Rosser said.
Rosser said Bloomington Township helps hundreds of people each year by reconnecting utilities, providing food, mediating disputes between neighbors, maintaining historic cemeteries and more.
“I think the role that townships play nowadays in preventing evictions and keeping people fed, clothed and housed, I think, is more important than ever as support from federal programs and other state programs is dwindling,” Rosser said.
Bloomington Township primarily serves people living at or just above the poverty line, Rosser said.
Critics of townships have argued that township duties could be better handled by counties or cities. Rosser said she understands taking measures to make local governance more efficient but emphasized the overlooked importance of townships.
“It’s something we should be proud of, that we have government this close to the people,” Rosser said.
Bloomington Township does not have a fire department, since it consolidated with the Monroe Fire Protection District a couple years ago. Rosser said Bloomington and Perry Townships are large enough that she doesn’t predict them being affected by either bill.
However, she said she is worried about the loss of rural townships and their essential services if HB 1315 were to pass. The Indiana Township Association is more in favor of SB 270, Rosser said, because HB 1315 puts more of a burden on county and city governments by requiring them to take over the duties of the eliminated townships.
Under HB 1315, Hoosiers with positions in eliminated township governments would likely be laid off, Rosser said.
If SB 270 passes and rural townships merge with Bloomington Township, Rosser said she is confident the townships will be able to work together to maintain services for rural communities.
“We’re just hoping that they (legislators) will balance the need for all the critical services that we provide, along with the desire that they have to want to consolidate various government units,” Rosser said.
Aaron Deslatte, associate professor at Indiana University's O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, said consolidating county and city governments was a popular topic in the 1960s, but has not been as prevalent or easy to achieve in recent decades. Voters no longer support massive consolidations, instead favoring smaller consolidations, like what Indiana is attempting with HB 1315 and SB 270.
He said the population of rural areas in Indiana has declined over the past few years as urban area populations have grown.
According to a Kelley School of Business analysis, the population in rural Indiana declined by 2.3% from 2010 to 2020.
This rural population decrease undercuts the central reasons for having a township government, Deslatte said, because townships serve places where there aren’t cities around to provide them with general services.
Using population size as a metric for consolidation is problematic, Deslatte said, because using such a “one-size-fits-all" rarely succeeds in all cases. What works better, according to Deslatte, would be a state-created process in which local governments review whether consolidation makes sense financially and politically for them. This would ensure that local governments look into possible savings and consider negotiations that they otherwise might not have considered.
If one of the bills passes, Deslatte said the damage incurred by affected areas would depend on how willing the county or city government is to deliver services previously provided by the area’s township. In the worst cases, Deslatte said merging township government with county or city government could drain resources and take time to reassign staff.
Deslatte, like Rosser, said HB 1315 has more risk of harming local governments.
“When you have a fairly simplistic metric or criteria for how you’re going to determine who merges and who doesn’t or who consolidates and who doesn’t, something like population size, that doesn’t necessarily work universally,” Deslatte said.
