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A few months ago, Steve Talley was hunched over documents in his small office at the Lawrence Township Trustees Office.
He reviewed paperwork that shows his staff granted just 34 of 475 requests from township residents for financial assistance in six months. He wondered why the number was so small.
Talley, one of nine elected township trustees in Marion County, is charged in part with using a portion of the tax dollars the township collects to provide short-term assistance, called poor relief, to those in need. The funds help residents in the township experiencing financial emergencies pay rent and utilities and for food and medical care.
Talley said he has now pored over the denials himself. He found that 209 individuals failed to provide documentation, others canceled their requests and the office determined that 43 people had sufficient income for their needs. His staff decided that 57 requests weren’t related to emergency events.
“We knew that [the denial rate] was high, but we did not know exactly why, or we just didn’t have the details,” Talley told IBJ. “I said, ‘Well, you know what? I’m gonna sit down and go through every application and see why.’”
Still, he knows the township can do more to help its neediest residents. A January report by poverty- and homelessness-focused service providers, titled “Marion County Township Trustees: Opportunities Seized; Opportunities Missed” sent that message.
The report—co-authored by the Greater Indianapolis Multifaith Alliance, Indiana Legal Services, the Indiana University McKinney Health and Human Rights Clinic, HealthNet Homeless Initiative Program and the Housing Justice Task Force of Meridian Street United Methodist Church—is the result of a yearlong investigation of Marion County’s township assistance program.
That investigation found that some township offices are “failing the city’s most vulnerable residents through needless delays, denials and underused funds,” a press release by the group states.
The group recommends that trustees allow walk-in applications, provide prompt responses to people seeking assistance, and use fair guidelines and available funds to provide more help in what it says is a time of housing and poverty crisis.
“That crisis is marked by 500 households receiving court eviction filings each week, one of every four households paying more than half of their household income in rent, and over 1,700 people sleeping unhoused each night,” the report states, referring to data from Princeton University’s Eviction Lab and the annual point-in-time count by Indianapolis homelessness service providers.
Township government was established in the late 1800s. In modern times, township government has shed most of its early responsibilities except for poor relief, fire protection and emergency response. For decades, government leaders have considered changes to township government and whether it’s still needed.
Responding to the report
Talley, the Lawrence Township trustee, has already begun making changes in his office.
He worked with the township board to increase the maximum net monthly income to receive assistance (from $1,396 for individuals to $1,694, and from $2,871 to $3,510 for a family of four). At the same time, the township increased the maximum payout for housing (from $950 for a two-bedroom to $1,327). And he created an email template for staff to send to applicants that reminds them of the documents the office needs to process their request and of the deadline.
He said his township office accepts walk-ins, but he’s found most residents want to talk with a caseworker and submit their documentation electronically, making appointments a better fit.
Ultimately, the report highlighted five criticisms of the assistance system. It said Marion County townships have high denial rates, delays in processing, complicated and inflexible rules, unused surplus funds and limited access to help.
“Trustees are supposed to provide timely and flexible assistance to keep people housed and safe,” the report said. “Despite these obligations, in many cases trustees don’t provide this important safety net, which contributes to the housing crisis in our community.”
IBJ attempted to interview all nine township trustees. Danny Meador of Franklin Township and Patty Haigenmaier of Perry Township didn’t respond to phone and email requests. Annette Johnson of Pike Township didn’t provide IBJ an interview time.
The six trustees IBJ was able to interview offered differing opinions on the report’s findings, from believing it didn’t go far enough to disagreeing with its methodology altogether.
In the latter group is Frank Short of Washington Township. Short told IBJ repeatedly that he holds no ill will toward the reports’ authors. But he said he didn’t get the opportunity to clear up confusion about the township’s practices before the report was published.
Plus, he said, the report’s authors and the township trustees are on the same team: all trying to help.
“They want to accomplish the same things we do,” Short said. “So come and sit down and talk to us, you know. One night, we’ll order pizzas and a case of beer and figure this out.”
Bette Bowman, the supervisor of poor relief for Washington Township, contested the report’s two major claims about the office. First, the report states that Washington Township assisted only 13% of those who applied for help. Bowman told IBJ the number of requests used in the report is inflated, because of several factors.
Trustees’ offices are required to submit a report annually to the State Board of Accounts, which appears publicly on the Indiana Gateway website.
The total number of denials, Bowman said, includes requests that the trustees’ office would not be able to fulfill under state statute. Also, one individual often files multiple requests for the same assistance. Because case managers must make a decision within 72 hours of the request being made, they occasionally have to close a case when their client can’t find the necessary information needed to process the request. Later, they create a new one.
Short and Bowman disagreed also with the report’s characterization of Washington’s walk-in practices. The report said walk-ins are permitted “precisely at 8 a.m. only,” but Bowman showed IBJ a log of individuals the office served through 9 a.m. She said the office often allows people to come in early or late in special circumstances.
“The misinformation that’s in there about our township could be easily explained,” Bowman said.
Consolidating efforts?
Meanwhile, Vernon Brown, the trustee in Warren Township, said the report didn’t go far enough in its recommendations.
He would like to see the current system, created in horse-and-buggy days, dismantled and replaced with one that consolidates all township offices. Voters would choose a singular, countywide trustee, rather than nine individuals governed by different boards and rules. Brown said that would decrease costs and increase consistency.
There are currently 1,005 trustees in Indiana. Proponents of eliminating them cite excessive administrative costs compared with private-sector nonprofits that provide similar services.
Brown knows his idea of consolidating isn’t popular among his colleagues because the idea isn’t new.
Then-Gov. Mitch Daniels directed a commission in 2007 to study local government reform, which ultimately determined that township governments should be eliminated. Since then, lawmakers have repeatedly filed bills to either consolidate or eliminate township government, without success.
A proposal this year, House Bill 1233, would have dissolved township government and given the duty of providing township assistance to one county trustee. Rep. Karen Engleman, R-Corydon, authored the bill, while Indianapolis Democrat Ed DeLaney was a coauthor. Lawmakers did not move the bill.
The lead authors of the Marion County report—Fran Quigley, an Indiana University-based human rights attorney, and Greater Indianapolis Multifaith Alliance Executive Director Aaron Spiegel—aren’t advocating for abolition of the system.
“I think the system is a good one,” Spiegel said. “This hyper-local government could work, and the original statutes really were set up to help, and it just hasn’t worked out that way.”
They also note in the report that researchers found that township government has promising impacts.
Differing realities
How each area of Marion County defines a need and fulfills it—or doesn’t—is based on the discretion of each township and its respective five-member board. Not only do they differ drastically in policy, but also in funding and manpower.
In Decatur Township, for example, Trustee Jason Holliday has just one employee that handles cases. He often helps process them. For 2024, the township gave assistance to 254 people.
Brown, in Warren, has three case workers. He said that’s not enough to deal with the workload, which led the office to cut the hours it’s open to help with assistance.
“Right now, we don’t take new clients on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I don’t have enough staff to process the clients that we have in the 72 hours,” Brown said.
Warren awarded township assistance to 725 people in 2024. Before long, he said, he will have to be at the front desk helping to process applications.
In addition to townships’ offering limited access to help, the report was also critical of townships’ unused surpluses. The report found that many trustees are sitting on large surpluses accumulated over several years.
Warren, which has the lowest surplus, at $1.09 million, is working to spend down its reserves. It’s doing so at a rate of about $500,000 annually, Brown said.
At the same time, Center Township has a surplus of $23.8 million. About a third of that is earmarked for poor relief. A staff of 10 worked last year specifically on township assistance, delivering $1.4 million in services to 5,356 individuals.
The current trustee, LaDonna Freeman, took office at the beginning of 2023. She said her township’s surplus was built by her predecessors.
Eric Bailey, director of finance for the township, said staff is working to pay down the surplus by giving out more assistance. The office gave out $1.2 million in assistance in 2022, the final year of Freeman’s predecessor Eugene Akers.
“Our direct assistance has improved. It’s gone up,” Bailey said.
The report specifically mentions those with reserves over $10 million. Aside from Center Township, the three townships that had over $10 million in surplus after 2024 have fire departments: Wayne, Decatur and Pike.
In Wayne Township, Trustee Jeb Bardon took office during a chaotic time. His predecessor and two former fire officials had pleaded guilty to conflict of interest after collecting salaries from both the township and a nonprofit affiliated with a fire department that serves the township.
Bardon, a former state lawmaker, was elected by fellow Democrats during a caucus to replace Chuck Jones, who resigned from the position after his conviction.
Since Bardon took office in 2022, his goal has been to increase the number of residents the township serves and to clean up some of the mess left by the previous office holder.
“We are taking care of people at a much higher rate than we were 2-1/2 years ago,” Bardon told IBJ.
He acknowledged that the trustee report by service reporters was “not a great report” and that its criticisms aren’t “far off.”
The office assisted 1,361 people in 2024, a nearly 40% increase from the 973 helped in 2022.
The authors of the report wish to see similar progress across Marion County’s nine townships.
Creative solutions
Critics see a lack of established, countywide practices as a problem. But proponents say trustees, who are close-to-home elected officials, should have discretion.
Debbie Driskell, executive director of the Indiana Township Association, testified against HB 1233, which sought to dissolve townships. She’s the trustee for Delaware Township in Hamilton County.
“When you drill down every neighborhood, needs are different,” Driskell said. “And that’s where a trustee has to discern, ‘What is the need? Where can I best meet that need without the expenditure of tax dollars?’”
Generally, trustees told IBJ the report couldn’t encompass all the ways they assist individuals in need that aren’t always directly connected to financial assistance. Most work with township small claims courts to prevent evictions through direct payments to landlords.
The report gives a peek into the system just as township trustees prepare to run for reelection in fall 2026. Because trustee elections generally receive little attention, the researchers aim to, in part, demystify what occurs in the offices.
“I would guess that 90 out of 100 people have no idea what a trustee is, who it is. They see that line on the ballot, and they have no idea what they’re running for,” Spiegel said. “The cynic in me says that’s by design.”•
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