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2005–2006 · AT BOUNDARY SIZE — THE COUNTY'S FIGHT, GRANGER'S TELLING OWNS THE DETAIL
The reform era's second wave — the Daniels administration's business rebuild of the Bureau — is the one that drew blood in this county, and it missed Osceola's counters: in 2005, under Commissioner Joel Silverman, the Bureau moved to close branches statewide in rounds. The South Bend Tribune's reporting, preserved in the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library's catalog record, carries the local round whole: "Hot on the heels of nine license branch closures, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles announced Monday that it wants to close 24 more, including branches in Walkerton, North Judson and Syracuse. At Walkerton, which employs 11 people, 56,470 transactions were conducted last year, compared to a systemwide average of almost 58,000."
The Tribune's editorial page answered in the county's own voice, under the headline "BMV plan would be a serious blow to service": "How early will Walkerton residents have to leave work in order to get to the South Bend or Mishawaka branch before it closes? And how much busier will the other St. Joseph County branches be if the Walkerton site is shut down?" The editorial is printed here because it names Osceola's counters as the county's load-bearing seats — the branches that would have absorbed a closure were the same two branches this town has always used. The outcome is the fact the current directories still print: Walkerton did not close. The branch stands at 302 Roosevelt Road today, on its two-day week, twenty years after the state announced it wanted the seat gone. The South Bend and Mishawaka branches were not on the 2005 lists reached; no closure or consolidation of a branch serving this ground was carried out in the reform rounds, and the county came out of the rebuild with its seats intact.