From an Op-Ed piece in today’s Journal Gazette as written by Marilyn Moran-Townsend who is the chief operating officer of CVC Communications and co-chair of the Local Government Efficiency Study Committee.Â
[…] Nowhere is the need to overhaul poor relief more evident than in Wayne Township, where the trustee’s office distributed more than $1.8 million in emergency assistance in 2007 but spent more than $3.6 million to administer it. That means that $2 was spent on overhead for every $1 distributed in poor relief. That’s unconscionable.
Subjective decisions
What’s also unconscionable is the lack of fairness in the current form of poor relief. First, the decisions about who gets relief are subjective, varying from township to township.
Second, the very Wayne Township residents to whom Stevenson refers – the 17 percent who live below the poverty line and their neighbors – are bearing a relatively higher tax burden to pay for poor relief than residents of most neighboring townships.
[…]Â The truth is that township government, with its 4,000 elected trustees and board members in Indiana, has outlived its usefulness.
[…]Â The boundaries for Indiana’s 1,008 townships were laid out in the 1790s, a quarter-century before Indiana became a state. They were drawn to accommodate the technology and culture of that time.
More than 200 years later, it’s long past time to recognize that our world has changed and so have the needs of our citizens.
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