INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Leaders of a panel on local government reform pledged Wednesday to conduct a comprehensive study of how local services are decided, provided and paid for in hopes of finding ways to make them more efficient, effective and cheaper.

Former Democratic Gov. Joe Kernan and Chief Justice Randall Shepard, co-chairmen of the Indiana Commission on Local Government Reform, told reporters after a first private meeting that steep increases in property taxes this year should pave the way for meaningful recommendations for reforming local government.

"This is a period in which citizens are more focused on what it is their government is doing and how it is doing it," Shepard said. "You hope out of the level of interest and in some places anger has generated the impetus for reforms that wouldn't occur if everybody were sitting around under very ordinary, sort of ho-hum circumstances."

The property tax increases and local government's reliance on those taxes was a key reason Gov. Mitch Daniels recently created the seven-member panel. Daniels, a Republican, has said for its size and population, Indiana has far too much local government.

About 2,730 local units have authority to levy property taxes, with only nine states having more, according to the Daniels administration. To govern all these units, Indiana elects nearly 11,000 officials, including 1,100 with responsibility for property tax assessment.

The commission, which is staffed by the Center for Urban Policy and the Environment at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, will try to determine what local government offices could be eliminated to achieve efficiencies and cost savings. Daniels wants to know specifically whether township and county property tax assessors should be abolished in favor of a uniform process run by the state.

The governor also wants to know what local government units, including schools and libraries, could be consolidated to reduce overhead and administrative expenses, and what constitutional, statutory or administrative changes are necessary to achieve significant reforms.

Daniels wants recommendations by the end of the year so they can be considered during the 2008 legislative session or beyond. A separate commission of lawmakers and outside tax experts is studying ways of providing property tax relief and reform, and the two panels are expected to share information in the coming weeks.

The local government commission, primarily through the Urban Policy Center, is expected to spend the next five or six weeks reviewing previous data and proposals and having private interviews with associations that represent local units and officials such as counties, cities and towns, schools and assessors.

Then sometime in October, the commission will hold a series of public forums around the state where people can voice their concerns and ideas. Comments can also be submitted to a Web site — indianalocalgovreform.iu.edu — via e-mail at
lgreform@iu.edu, or by voicemail at 317-261-3025.

"All of the recommendations that come in will be acknowledged, will be looked at and will be considered," Kernan said. "The more information we get, the better the chance we can recommendations that will be successful."