Another member of our CICP Board of Directors, Collina Ventures’ Mark Hill, has penned a compelling piece on the need to reform local government – part of an ongoing editorial push on the part of the Indianapolis Star and a network of other Indiana newspapers to raise awareness of the need to streamline and consolidate the thousands of political offices that form a haphazard patchwork of bureaucracies across the state.
As someone who’s spent his career in the tech sector, Hill understands the power of technology to cut costs and enhance productivity. A tech pundit once estimated that if progress in the rest of the economy matched progress in the computer sector, a Cadillac would cost $5.91, while ten minutes’ labor would buy a year’s worth of groceries.
Unfortunately, Indiana’s system of local government is anti-innovation – instead of becoming more efficient, it’s grown increasingly outdated and cumbersome.
Here is Hill’s op-ed:
Power of innovation can fix local government
Last week, the Indiana General Assembly convened at the statehouse to face the most daunting fiscal situation in a generation or more – a billion dollar deficit.
But budget problems aren’t confined to the state level, and our lawmakers’ responsibilities don’t stop there either. Across Indiana, local communities are dealing with the dual effects of the recession and property tax caps; Indianapolis alone faced a $50 million shortfall for its 2011 budget.
The state legislature can help our cities and counties do more with less, by mustering the political courage to reform our broken system of local government.
My career has been spent in the technology sector, a field that thrives on new ideas and change. The power of high-tech innovation tends to cut costs and increase productivity. My experience tells me that the big gains from technology actually come using the technology to change the process.
Unfortunately, our system of local government has not materially changed for more than a century-and-a-half; so instead of evolving to become more efficient and less costly, it’s done just the opposite. It’s grown into a cumbersome and confusing maze of bureaucracy, notable for the quantity of political offices rather than the quality of public services provided.
An entire layer of government – the townships – exists to deliver services that could be more efficiently managed by counties. And at the county level, too many elected officials perform purely administrative tasks – like coroner, recorder, or surveyor – that should have nothing to do with partisan politics.
Township government is a perfect example of what’s wrong with the system. The major responsibility of township trustees is delivering poor relief. But there’s no common standard or procedure for doing so. Half the townships report serving less than twenty households, and the average trustee spends eight times more in overhead to deliver every dollar in direct assistance than a typical private charity (using the United Way of Central Indiana as a baseline). I know at United Way we work very hard to keep our overhead down so that we can deliver resources to those in need.
The situation cries out for change. But the lack of visibility of these offices insulates them from public scrutiny – most township officials run unopposed in general elections, attracting little attention from the citizens they profess to serve.
Township government should be abolished altogether, or at the very least have their budgets overseen and approved by county councils to bring some accountability to their taxing and spending decisions. Counties should have the option to consolidate administrative offices and adopt a single executive form of government.
Defenders of the status quo have defeated these proposals during the last two legislative sessions. But this year could be different. Governor Daniels is a strong advocate of reform, and the new majority in the House of Representatives may be willing to put their belief in smaller government into action.
These changes represent their own kind of innovation, the kind of change that’s long-overdue for a system designed in an age of travel by horseback rather than broadband communications.
Hill, managing partner of Collina Ventures, chairs the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership's TechPoint technology and entrepreneurship initiative.
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