Indiana legislators are in the midst of major reform to our outdated property tax system.  They are also looking at ways to create efficiencies by consolidating some segments of our local government.  There has been much debate for and against these proposals and I am sure this will be a long term effort.

On November 4th, 2008, Indiana voters in 43 townships will vote on whether to complete the consolidation of property assessing duties to the county level; an initiative was started by our legislators in January of this year.  In the final hours of the legislative session the bill was modified to allow township assessors whose townships contain more than 15,000 parcels of land to remain in office and have their fates determined by public referendum.  Following is my take on what has happened so far and why we need to complete the task in November.

To put this into some kind of perspective, Indiana (prior) to January 2008, had one assessor for every county and one for every township.  This amounted to 1,180 assessors in Indiana.  Now here is the scary part:  That is more than California, Texas, Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.  COMBINED!  What's wrong with this picture???  In January our legislators eliminated over 1,000 township assessors and made their duties the responsibility of the county assessor.  Based on the last minute change described above, 43 remain.  It is imperative that voters in Indiana complete the task in November by voting for the consolidation of the assessor duties.

I am not saying that the township assessors have all done a bad job, but let’s face it, township government in Indiana was created over 150 years ago to keep government close to the people when horse and buggy was the primary mode of transportation.  And here is another good statistic that shows the top-heavy system of Indiana's local government:  Indiana has 3,100 units of local government out of approximately 39,000 units of local government nationwide.  That is about 8% of the national local government units for a state that holds about 2% of the national population!  Are you starting to get the picture?

This is not about cutting jobs and saving money.  It is totally about balancing the inconsistencies inherent in our current assessment system.  Here is why the system doesn't work.  This is a pretty basic example, but you will get the gist.  If you live in a county with 10 townships, and two township assessors accurately assess the values of the properties in their townships while the remaining eight under assess the values of their properties, you will pay a disproportionately higher amount of property taxes if you live in one of the two townships even though your assessor did a good job.

There have been numerous examples shown in Indiana where nearly identical properties in close proximity to one another have had wide gaps in their assessments which results in one paying significantly higher property taxes than the other.  By moving the assissing duties to the county level, we will significantly reduce the number of assessors and the disparities that can occur.  It's like the old saying about having, "too many cooks in the stew".  Having a county's assessing managed by one individual will allow anomalies to be recognized more easily and eventually an equilibrium will be reached.

If you live in one of the townships that will vote on the referendum, please show your support for this important legislation by voting "yes" on the referendum question.  It will be at the end of the ballot, so be sure to go to the end and complete this important step in the right direction that our legislators have put before us.  If you live in Allen County, the referendum will be on the ballot if you are a resident of Aboite, St. Joe or Wayne township.

For more information on this and other issues surrounding a more efficient local government structure for Indiana, visit http://www.mysmartgov.org.