It's not that we want to jump into the middle of a squabble in Louisville, Ky. between foes and supporters of city-county consolidation there, but it seems inevitable that opponents of a proposed merger here will cite Louisville issues as a reason to oppose it here.
Louisville and Jefferson County merged their city and county governments in 2003, and now a mayor's task force in Louisville is studying its effectiveness there.
State Rep. Darryl Owens, a consolidation foe, authorized his own study because he felt the commission was not looking at issues he felt were crucial. According to The Associated Press, Owens' study, by Hank Savitch, a professor at the University of Louisville, has concluded that consolidation has failed to bring in more jobs and economic development, and has not made government more efficient.
Savitch reported that the merger campaign made specific promises that a merged government would accelerate economic development and make Louisville competitive with Nashville and Indianapolis, it would attract capital investment, it would bring more jobs to the city and it would bring greater efficiency by eliminating duplicative services.
Just an aside: Nashville and Indianapolis are both consolidated cities, so if Louisville isn't competitive with them — and we're not saying it isn't — they can't blame consolidation.
As to those promises, no one in Evansville or Vanderburgh County has promised that a merger here would accelerate economic development, would attract capital investment or would bring in more jobs.
What it would do would be to put into place a better government structure for welcoming and inviting development. It would be up to the people running the consolidated government to take advantage of a more streamlined structure.
And it has been promised here that consolidated government would be more efficient by eliminating duplicated offices. How could it not? We have a city council and a county council. We have a mayor and we have three county commissioners. We have a city clerk and a county clerk, and so on. Fewer offices should result in a better understanding of local government by the people.
Granted the city and county here have done a good job of merging what functions they could, but there comes a time when the residents of this small county must ask themselves why they need overlapping councils and offices.
No one can promise that consolidation would create more jobs or would attract more capital investment. That would be foolish.
But it can be promised that a single countywide government would be more user friendly for developers and businesses looking at the prospects of locating here.
It has been promised that a consolidated city-county government would provide a better structure for focused leadership.
But even there, in the end, success is measured more as a product of individual ability than of the form of the government.
We don't know one whit about how that takes place in Louisville, but we do know that using Louisville's success or failure as a measure for the potential in Evansville and Vanderburgh County is nonsense.