The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
2005–2006 · THE COUNTY'S FIGHT, FROM THE COUNTY SEAT'S SIDE
The reform era's second wave — the Daniels administration's business rebuild of the Bureau — drew blood in this county, and the South Bend branch's part in the fight is the part of the branch that was never threatened: 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 county seat's branch is not in the list. It is in the editorial.
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 states this branch's structural place in the county's system in the county paper's own words: the South Bend branch was the load-bearing counter, the absorber of first resort, the branch whose lines measured what a closure anywhere else in the county would cost. The outcome is the fact the Bureau's own later record prints: Walkerton did not close, and no South Bend seat was closed or consolidated in the reform rounds — the county came out of the rebuild with its seats intact, and the Bureau's notices of 2014 and 2021 carry the county seat's branch forward at St. Joseph Street on its full-service footing.
The second attempt of the era touched this ground only at boundary size, and it is printed at that size here because its whole course is Walkerton's. In October 2021 the Bureau opened the formal process to consolidate the Walkerton branch into the Nappanee branch in Elkhart County; it closed Nappanee itself a year later, in October 2022. The South Bend branch was not named in the 2021 notices — the consolidation's geography bypassed the county seat's counter entirely — and the branch's own modern course, the move south to Ireland Road, belongs to the article that follows.