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2005–2006 · THIS TOWN'S OWN FIGHT
The reform era's second wave — the Daniels administration's business rebuild of the Bureau — is the one that first drew blood in this county, and it named this town by name: 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."
Read closely, the Bureau's own numbers made the town's case for it: a part-time branch in a town of two thousand people, running 56,470 transactions a year — within three percent of the statewide branch average — and employing eleven people in a town where eleven state jobs are a factory floor. 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 the town's counters' place in the county's load-bearing structure — the same two city branches that would have absorbed a closure.
The outcome is the fact the Bureau's own later record prints: Walkerton did not close. Nine years after the state announced it wanted the seat gone, the Bureau's release of October 27, 2014 lists the branch at 302 Roosevelt Road on its Tuesday-and-Thursday week among the county's working branches, and it stands in the Bureau's branch notices into February 2021. 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. The 2005 round is, for Walkerton, a documented attempt and a documented survival — the first of two, sixteen years apart.