Unigov: Indianapolis Is One City and Several Governments
Since 1970, one mayor for city and county — with four excluded cities, eleven school districts, and the townships surviving underneath. Unigov, the consolidation that made modern Indianapolis, explained.
Indianapolis governs itself under an arrangement no other Indiana city has: Unigov, the consolidated city-county government created in 1970 under then-mayor Richard Lugar, which merged Indianapolis with most of Marion County into a single political body. The mayor of Indianapolis is, in effect, also the county's executive; the City-County Council, twenty-five members elected by district, legislates for both. It remains one of the most complete consolidations any American city has enacted — and its exceptions are as instructive as its rule.
The merger was never total. The county's old township structure survives beneath Unigov like a palimpsest: township trustees and assessors still serve, school districts remained stubbornly independent — Marion County still counts eleven school corporations within the consolidated city — and four 'excluded cities' (Lawrence, Beech Grove, Southport, and Speedway) kept their own mayors and councils inside the county's borders. Police consolidation arrived a generation late, with the 2007 merger that created the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department from the city police and the sheriff's law-enforcement division.
The theory of Unigov was regional: a city that could plan, tax, and borrow at the scale of its real economic footprint, capturing the suburbs' growth inside the city's fiscal walls instead of watching the core hollow out as other Rust Belt cities did. By the measures its defenders cite — the city's retained tax base, its credit, its ability to assemble land for stadiums and conventions — the theory largely worked. Indianapolis in 1970 was a shrinking industrial city; the consolidated city that resulted became the 15th-largest in America by population, a ranking that is partly arithmetic and partly the point.
The arrangement's democratic questions persist: a mayor elected by a county-wide electorate governs neighborhoods whose council representation was diluted by design, and the townships' survival leaves Indiana's most urban county with one of its most layered local governments — a consolidated city that contains multitudes, literally.
For the voter, the practical map is what endures: the mayor and council run the consolidated city; the township trustee still handles poor relief and fire in some areas; the school board answers to its own district's voters; and the excluded cities run their own Main Streets inside the capital's orbit. Indianapolis is one city on the map and several governments on the ground — the permanent compromise of 1970, still governing.
