Town hall, departments, and the municipal utilities

MUNICIPAL WATER AND ELECTRIC SINCE BEFORE 1907 · THE ADMINISTRATOR'S NAME A NAMED GAP

Walkerton was a utility town before it was much else: Howard's 1907 history already records the town owning and operating its own water works and its own electric light plant, and the municipal frame has held — the town still bills its own utilities out of the clerk-treasurer's office, where a deputy clerk's whole portfolio is utility billing, and still takes its after-hours utility emergencies through the police dispatch number. The Municipal Building at 301 Michigan Street is the whole of town hall: council, clerk, court, and police under one roof, the fire station a few blocks away at 504 Washington Street. One office in the building is attested but its holder unnamed. Council President Reese, describing the town's team in 2026, names it in a row — "Town Council, Town Administrator, Clerk-Treasurer" — so a Town Administrator's office exists in Walkerton's government; no source reached names the person who holds it, and the seat rides as GAP-WKGOV-4, settled by the town's salary ordinance and the State's Gateway employee compensation report for the town, which names every employee the town pays. The same report settles the public-works superintendency, where the only names reached are aggregator listings in open conflict with each other — one crawl naming a Steve Lippert as Public Works Director, another a Jeff Zehner, a third a Josh Rice as "Superintendent" — printed here as an unverified conflict and carried as GAP-WKGOV-8 rather than resolved by preference. No building official, and no town attorney of the current term, is named in the sources reached; the absences are stated as tested, not assumed.

Sources:

1. Howard (1907), Part 53: the town's own water works and electric light plant, in operation by 1907.
2. Town of Walkerton (walkerton.in), government and department pages, crawled October 2026: the Municipal Building's offices, the utility-billing deputy, and the after-hours dispatch arrangement.
3. Redress South Bend (April 30, 2026): Reese's naming of the Town Administrator's office among the town's officers.
4. ZoomInfo employee directory for the Town of Walkerton, crawls of 2026: the Lippert, Zehner, and Rice listings — aggregator strength, in mutual conflict, printed as such.