The County Line
Joe Hogsett, mayor of our big sister city, Indianapolis, has a big problem with his streets, and he’s come up with an idea to have surrounding counties help him out of it. Of course, it’s an election year. Joe needs to get votes, and there’s nothing like telling the voters that you’ve found somebody else to pay for their needs.
So, Joe wants to have his surrounding counties, like Hamilton County, put some yet-to-be determined amount of their Local Income Tax money into a fund that would fix crumbling streets. Supposedly, Hamilton County would get some of its money back. But, likely not much.
This “regional” approach to road repair would require state legislation. It is true that a lot of our county’s residents use Indy’s streets; about 58,000 of our people commute into the city. And, about 15,000 Indianapolis residents commute to Hamilton County. Indy would benefit greatly by using those numbers in some kind of a formula that is yet to be devised.
And, there are a few other problems with Joe’s idea. Chief among them is the fact that commuters from our county already pay four tenths of one percent of their income in Marion County as their Deputy Auditor Drew Carlson told me yesterday. That might not sound like much, but by my conservative calculations it amounts to between $5 million and $6 million per year. You can fix a lot of chuckholes with that along with the money from the other surrounding counties.
There’s another consideration. While we have 58,000 commuters to Indy, we have about 318,000 people in Hamilton County. That means a vast majority, 260,000 more or less, do not commute and may not want to pay to fix Joe’s problem.
And, then we should consider that many commuters use largely interstate highways like 69 and 465 to get to work. Indianapolis does not maintain these roads, the state highway department (INDOT) is solely responsible.
The Local Income Tax (formerly known as COIT) is a big part of Hamilton County’s life blood for public services and facilities. Our county, cities, towns, townships and libraries get more than $156 million from this tax each year. Giving up part of it would potentially reduce local government’s services at all these levels.
Our local officials and legislators have a lot of serious thinking to do before agreeing to any “regional” approaches that Marion County politicians propose in an election year.