INDIANAPOLIS-- As a priority for state lawmakers in 2009, an extreme local government overhaul ranks well below putting Hoosiers to work and passing a state budget amidst a deep recession.

That is what I usually hear from folks in my district, what they have said in letters, surveys and e-mails to my office.

They want to know what the Indiana General Assembly can do to turn around our state's economy, not whether we are going to eliminate elected offices from the ballot.

This week, The NBC Nightly News reported on the Depression-level unemployment in parts of Indiana. Clearly, we have plenty of real problems.

More than any other factor, I believe the lack of public support has pushed aside efforts this session to see enactment of reforms originally suggested by a commission led by Indiana Supreme Court Justice Randall Shepard and former Gov. Joe Kernan.

This week, members of both parties on the House Government and Regulatory Reform Committee defeated an effort to place into state law the reforms originally suggested by the Shepard-Kernan commission. While these proposals are technically still alive through the rest of the 2009 session, it is difficult to see any of them gaining much support, especially as the Legislature attempts to reach a consensus on a statewide stimulus package and a new budget.

When these reforms were initially announced, they were portrayed as an effort to reduce what commission members saw as inefficient government at the local level.

Their recommendations included turning many county officials-- including the sheriff, clerk, auditor and treasurer-- into appointed rather than elected positions. They recommended replacing county commissioners with either a single county executive or a single legislative body. They also recommended getting rid of all township government and called for another round of school consolidation.

Making government more efficient and wise in its use of taxpayer dollars should be a goal for elected officials at all levels. The Indiana House, for instance, already has passed a measure that I authored to eliminate duplicate services offered by the state Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Out of a belief that state government should practice what it preaches, we also moved forward legislation to combine the offices of state auditor and treasurer into a single state controller.

But I believe there is a problem when you begin to talk about replacing local elected officials with appointed officials who are only accountable to the people who appointed them, rather than to the public. While criticism of elected officials is as American as apple pie, we also like the idea that we are still their bosses. The good ones are responsible and accessible. If they are not, they sometimes get voted out of office.

As these Shepard-Kernan proposals began working their way through the Indiana Senate, it was obvious that even legislative leaders of the Governor's own party had problems with them. A number of the original recommendations were watered down to make them minimally acceptable, and the entire package was placed in several different bills.

However, these changes only served to muddy the waters. Areas like Lake and Marion Counties -- whose operations some like to hold up as examples of waste -- were exempted from some of the reforms, many of which were initially heralded as the way to correct the administrative problems in those very counties.

In addition, the effort to replace county commissioners was turned into a confusing series of options. Those choices included leaving it up to the commissioners themselves to determine whether to eliminate their jobs or putting the matter up for a local referendum.

When these issues reached the Indiana House, the Government and Regulatory Reform panel restored the Shepard-Kernan proposals into a single bill that would enable representatives to consider it in its entirety. After nearly four hours of testimony and debate in the committee, a bipartisan vote of the members soundly rejected the concepts.

Do the ideas behind government reform deserve to be debated in sessions to come? Reforms that truly lead to improved services at reduced cost should always be discussed.

But the advocates of Kernan-Shepard did not do a good job convincing the people of Indiana that the changes would provide a government that was better able to respond to the public's needs. With so many people struggling, an accountable government is more important than ever.

The latest figures show Indiana 's unemployment rate is 9.2 percent, an official statistic which means more than 300,000 Hoosiers are out of work and actively trying to find a job. That is the highest number in nearly 30 years. Should we be drastically cutting government services when those services are needed the most? That is the key question.