Fixing townships will not, in the words of a very young Herman B Wells, give us bigger sidewalks and better beers. As Biddle notes, though, in Marion County township consolidation will allow for more efficient provision of certain emergency services. Moreover, I would argue that the simple consolidation of the townships into two intuitively-defined areas (roughly the "city" and the "county") will help in a number of ways.

First, all other things being equal, the total going expenditure of township government will have to be lower, if for no other reason that there will be fewer officials, offices, and family members to hire.

Second, and as a consequence, Marion County townships will almost certainly fare better on measures of efficiency after the township consolidation simply because there will be less overhead.

Third, and to answer a common objection, it will be the case that there will be enhanced accountability for township-level governments post-Indy Works. The writer states: "Instead of nine locally elected and accountable trustees, you will have two larger bureaucracies with several branch offices. Does experience suggest that larger, less publicly accountable bureaucracies are better at fiscal management?" Yes. The problems of township fiscal accountability in Marion County's townships, which are simply the best-documented problems in the state, are a result of the difficulty of voters' holding township officials to account. It is easy to fix the blame (fairly or--sometimes--unfairly) for problems in municipal governance on a democratically-elected official: The tribulations of every mayor, and to a lesser extent the municipal council, are reported in the newspaper, and nearly every voter at least knows the mayor's name.

But if the municipal buck stops in the mayor's office, where does it stop at the township level? Township politics fall below a newspaper's eye level, and there is no local accountability mechanism to make these affairs truly public. Further, few voters will have the knowledge necessary to judge the competence of township officials from their own experience (especially given the narrow clientele which the township trustee serves).

Nine townships are too many for the media and the voters to keep an eye on. Two, however, is a much more manageable number. (Zero, I suspect, might be even better, but unfortunately no pressure group exists to serve the public interest in general as opposed to the interests of specific public servants.)

A study commission on townships is needed to give an imprimatur to sorely-needed reforms. However, it is difficult to see what lessons could be drawn from the experiences of other counties in the state that would be applicable to Marion County's unique situation. All the lessons we could draw are immediately obvious, and have been amply publicized in the Star and other sources.

The legislature can consider the general question of township governance in Indiana by a study commission. But there's no reason to hold up these specific reforms for two more years.