The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
City and county have shared buildings since 1971 and a second building since 2011 — but never a government. Allen County remains a separate corporation with its own commissioners, council and row officers, and the overlapping structure is regularly denounced as an 1800s inheritance. During the Aboite fight, Councilman Tom Hayhurst wrote publicly that Fort Wayne and Allen County residents should at minimum be allowed by the state to decide their own government structure, and reported State Senator David Long sympathetic to more local say (The Waynedale News, 7 December 2005). Indianapolis merged under UniGov in 1970; Fort Wayne, in more than fifty years of recurring debate since, has not. No consolidation has been enacted, and the question still surfaces whenever annexation fights or state government-modernization bills move — the one structural decision in this entire record that two centuries of officeholders have argued about without ever taking.