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1986–1988
The patronage system's end began in 1986, and it was announced as a service scandal as much as a political one: the Indianapolis Business Journal's retrospective states the sequence plainly — "Gov. Robert Orr began the hard work in 1986 to modernize the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles and remove it from the seedy grip of political patronage." The instrument was a five-member bipartisan Bureau of Motor Vehicles Commission, and in July 1986 the Kokomo Tribune reported what the commission intended: pilot branches opening the following January to test late hours, appointments and modern payment, and then the takeover itself — the commission "will take over the state's 187 politically controlled branches in July 1988." The report states the old order in one sentence: "Under the current system the branches are controlled by the political party of the governor. The branch manager often is the county chairman of that party, which benefits from the patronage jobs in branches and from contributions from some of the branch fees."
For St. Joseph County the takeover's meaning was concrete: the South Bend and Mishawaka counters — among the richest patronage plums in the state by the 1958 arithmetic — passed from the county organization to a state commission, their managers from party appointees to state employees. The commission structure the 1980s built is the structure that still governs: the State Board of Accounts' review of the Bureau for fiscal 2007 describes the Bureau of Motor Vehicles Commission as five individuals appointed by the Governor to four-year terms, with the Commissioner of the Bureau as its chair. The counts of the system the commission inherited print as the sources give them: 187 "politically controlled" branches in the 1986 reporting; 189 branches in 1988 in the Business Journal's retrospective count. The two figures are printed side by side, each at its source, and the difference — a count of the political branches against a count of all branches, two years apart — is left as it stands.
What the takeover did not do is move any counter closer to New Carlisle. The branch map the commission inherited was the patronage map, seats in the county's cities and its one outlying town; the decades after 1988 culled it (the Business Journal counts 189 branches in 1988 against 124 in 2022) — they did not extend it. A state law noted in the same retrospective requires at least one license branch in each of Indiana's 92 counties — a floor that protects counties, not towns — and St. Joseph County's floor has never been in question. New Carlisle's course was untouched by the reform except in the character of the counters its people drove to: after July 1988, the clerk at the South Bend counter worked for the state, not for the county organization.
Principal sources: Indianapolis Business Journal retrospective (October 7, 2022); Kokomo Tribune, July 11, 1986; State Board of Accounts, Bureau review, fiscal 2007.