An interesting night

When I registered the domain for this website a few weeks ago I chose it because it sounded good and was available, little did I recognize the apparent high level of support for incorporating White River Township that is running throughout our community. If the comments at tonight’s “township town hall” meeting at Center Grove High School is representative of the citizens, incorporation trumps the other options, merger, annexation, or doing nothing, by a wide margin. As one resident put it “Our taxes are going to go up no matter what happens so we might as well incorporate and keep the money for ourselves.” He went on to say at least he would have the ability to vote on how the money is spent.

Sure we get to vote for Johnson County government officials, but those offices were not designed to provide services for a heavily populated township such as ours. According to information provided by White River Citizens United (link) 29% of the county’s population resides in WRT and 39% of the county’s assessed property value exists here. Yet the county government is tasked with taking care of the entire county not just our township.

What does that mean to WRT residents? We don’t get “our share” of the taxes the county gets from us, or distributed by the state to the county, spent on the roads and services required in WRT. My point is not to find fault with the efforts of our county government we are just not that important to them.

Law enforcement isn’t an issue, it is hard to drive through the township without encountering a deputy on patrol and on the few occasions I have had to call on their assistance you can’t complain about the response time. On the other hand, how long does it take the county to clear the snow from the streets in your subdivision, or even keep the main roads clean around Center Grove High School? It is not because we are ignored it is simply the fact that there are hundreds of miles of roads in our county and somehow I can’t get the county highway department to clean my street first.

What’s the solution? Bring effective and efficient government closer to the people. Do we do that by merging with Greenwood? They already have a system of local government in place, and boy do they have it, everything from a “redevelopment commission” to a sanitation department. I am a little hard pressed to figure out why WRT residents need a redevelopment commission and it seems that all my neighbors know how to hire a private company to pick up their garbage. Those are two services we don’t need a city government to provide, there are others.

A number of areas around the USA have incorporated, privatized most functions of the city government, greatly limiting the number of employees (Greenwood has an entire human resources department to handle their employees, if we really need one we can hire a company to handle HR for less than creating an entire bureaucracy) keeping costs low, service high, and government limited. If you want to learn more such efforts check out the book Creating the New City of Sandy Springs: The 21st Century Paradigm from the publisher (Link). I understand the book is now available in paperback from the previous link. I bought my copy for $9 used, shop around, you may want to check www.HALF.com too. Yup, I’m all about saving money.  Andy my copy was signed by the author to whom I must provide a big thank you for allowing me “modify” his cover for the “White River Incorpated” sign on this site without payment, but I do want to recognize his and his publishers contributions. 

If you didn’t attend the meeting tonight you should have, you would have seen plenty of examples of why we need to change our current form of government and I believe you would have been impressed by the sense of community in White River Township and the common sense of the residents as well.

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