The Journal Gazette, 600 W. Main St., Fort Wayne IN

HUNTINGTON – Nearly everyone understands losing weekly garbage service and closing a fire station aren’t good.

Property tax formulas, reassessment technicalities, archaic government structure and economic trends may be puzzling, boring and easy to ignore, but it’s hard to miss their effects in Huntington.

City officials face a budget that’s expected to be $5 million below just two years ago – a drop of one-third from the $15 million 2008 budget. So Mayor Steve Updike has had to make difficult decisions. He laid off six of the city’s 41 firefighters – 15 percent of the force – and closed one of the city’s three fire stations. He cut the street department from 19 to 11 full-time workers, and the 12 part-time slots were eliminated. The street department workers pick up trash, and when the City Council refused to approve a $3 monthly trash fee for residents, Updike reduced trash pickup to twice a month.

“It’s a bad time to be mayor,” Updike said, an observation a number of Hoosier mayors doubtlessly share.

Indeed, mayors across the state are being forced to make similar decisions on how to cut budgets. People know that mayors are the top city officials, and it’s only natural to assign them blame when local government has problems. Few Hoosiers understand that city tax policies – which determine how much money is available to provide services – are the result of an arcane process requiring accurate property assessments, good estimations and complex calculations by county assessors, county auditors and state finance officials. With state legislatures determining tax polices – policies they have been all too willing to change, change and change again over the last decade – many of the budgeting decisions are outside the control of mayors and city councils.

One of the big problems facing Huntington is a result of 2008’s property tax “reform,” when bad practices in Indianapolis and a few other places prompted legislators to cap property tax bills statewide, limits that voters could well decide to put into the state constitution in a November referendum. The result in Huntington, as the accompanying map shows, is few properties paying full tax bills. Most are limited by tax caps, directly reducing revenue to the government. Others are non-profits that pay no taxes.

Another problem – one that helped pushed city government into crisis mode last fall – was the volume of owners who had overpaid property taxes because their property assessments were too high. One good move the legislative tax overhaul package made was to eliminate nearly all of the township assessors – where quality and professionalism varied widely – and transfer their duties to the county assessor. Huntington County Assessor Terri Boone said that when she took over the township duties on July 1, 2008, she inherited more than 700 assessment appeals, most of which were ultimately successful. That meant money had to be returned, and those property owners would pay less in the future.

The effect of the successful appeals on city finances wasn’t clear, though, until the city received its tax revenue disbursement last fall – and it was hundreds of thousands of dollars less than expected.

A third factor: Huntington has been particularly battered by the lingering recession, with a number of key employers closing down and laying people off. As a result, said city Operations Manager Ruth Marsh, 13 percent of property tax bills have gone unpaid.

While the trash pickup and fire station closing are the most visible of the changes, city officials have made numerous other cuts. Those include freezing worker pay – including the “step,” or longevity pay raises that come with an additional year of experience – and eliminating retirement plan matching contributions. A total of 20 employees have been laid off.

And the city has come up with some innovations. With fewer workers to plow snow off the streets, plows were placed on trucks used by water and sewer workers, who began helping with snow removal.

“This has made everyone stop and think, act like this is your own money, your own household,” said Christi Scher, the city clerk-treasurer.

In some ways, Marsh added, “government employees had forgotten where their paycheck comes from.”

But, Scher notes, “we’ve cut more than just the fat at this point.”

So Huntington residents face some tough choices. Are they willing to pay a trash collection fee to resume weekly pickup? Are they willing to pay higher local income taxes to help restore some of the public safety money?

A Republican, Updike doesn’t see the tax overhaul as all bad. “We are the poster child for the tax program,” he said. Government is “much leaner, less people working.”

While the property tax overhaul was directed at limiting property tax bills, the conservative governor and conservative legislative leaders behind it knew full well that it would begin to choke off money to localities, forcing cuts. When local officials began to warn of the degree of cuts that would be required, Gov. Mitch Daniels attacked them.

“The absolutely predictable whining has started from those who just can’t imagine getting by with a little less in the future,” Daniels said in February 2008.

Like Daniels, many Hoosiers have called for less government.

In Huntington, residents are learning that “a little less” means a little less trash pickup, a little less fire stations.

As officials statewide develop budgets for 2011 this summer, residents in many more Hoosier communities will be learning what less government means.

“Any elected politician will tell you there was always fat in government,” Updike said. “But if you don’t have enough money to plow the streets, to pick up the garbage, if you don’t have enough firefighters to put out fires … where does it end?”