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The pending decision over the fate of township government in Indiana carries with it a Gordian knot — fire protection.
Bluffton Fire Chief Bob Plummer was at the Board of Public Works and Safety meeting a few days ago, talking about a routine matter, and the conversation turned to a topic Plummer understands as well as anyone in Wells County.
Plummer and Bluffton Mayor Ted Ellis have been looking into the future, and as they talked, it became obvious that no one is completely certain what will happen with fire protection if there are no more township trustees.
The county has eight fire departments (Ossian, Uniondale, Markle, Bluffton, Nottingham Township, Chester Township, Poneto, and Liberty Center, with Jackson Township relying on Warren in Huntington County and Van Buren in Grant County). Township trustees are very important when it comes to the rural volunteer departments. How important? The money goes through them.
If township government is eliminated, who’s going to be responsible for the township fire departments? As I understand it, control will go to the next layer of government; if there is no city level (Bluffton and Ossian, for example), the county will get it.
What a can of worms that could be.
Let’s suppose, for a second, that Township A has a new fire truck and Township B has a 30-year-old fire truck. Let’s assume that Township B has a nice new fire station and Township A has a place to park its new truck and nothing more. You’re now in charge. Do you put the new fire truck, paid for by the residents of now-defunct Township A, into the nicer fire station paid for by the residents of the former Township B? That may make sense in an overall management sense, but the residents — and, we presume, the firefighters — from Township A might be a little perturbed that Township B gets to house their spiffy new fire truck.
Plummer said there are two ways to go about creating oversight authorities over fire departments. One way is to establish a fire district — an organized layer of government that becomes its own taxing unit. The other way is to establish a fire territory — where the existing units of government cooperate for fire protection and taxes from those entities (cities, towns, counties) support the fire department.
As the conversation about eliminating township government goes forward, this is one of the issues that must be addressed. The argument for eliminating township government talks about streamlining government and economy of scale. The argument against eliminating township government talks about government by people who know their area, the kind of intimacy that would be lacking on a county level.
Those viewpoints certainly play out in the field of fire protection. A centralized fire authority would allocate resources evenly; it would also be more removed from the residents of Township A or B, where the people have eaten a lot of pancake and sausage breakfasts to pay for the fire truck and the fire station.
I have no idea if the sweeping recommendation from the Kernan-Shepard commission to eliminate township government will ever be adopted. I do know that if it is, there will be winners and losers.
by DAVE SCHULTZ
daves@news-banner.com
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