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1971 — present
Fifty years of maybe: Fort Wayne and Allen County have shared a building since 1971 and a second building, Citizens Square, since 2011 — and have never merged a single department into a single government. Indianapolis consolidated under UniGov in 1970; Fort Wayne has debated the same step, in the government's own telling, for more than fifty years since, and has never taken it. During the Aboite fight the question surfaced in its sharpest local form: Councilman Tom Hayhurst wrote publicly that residents should at minimum be allowed by the state to decide their own government structure, and reported State Senator David Long sympathetic. Nothing was enacted. The merger question is the city's longest-running controversy precisely because it has no resolution: it stands open.
Sources:
- The government record, Government — the shared buildings, the recurring debate, and the Hayhurst–Long exchange (The Waynedale News, 7 December 2005).