Local Government Reform
March 10, 2009
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Mary Hart
Mary Hart has worked in the Trustee's Office for 28 years. She is
widowed with one child and two grandchildren and serves on several
area boards such as, Cape, Emergency Food and Shelter Grant, Aurora,
the Initiative Based Assistance Program and is also the President of
the Indiana Township Association. Mary was elected to office in June
of 1995.
Joe Kiefer
Joe Kiefer served on the Evansville City Council from 2000-2007 and
has served on the Vanderburgh County Council since 2008.
His long-term goals include
studying combining local government and looking for ways to
streamline government, eliminate waste, and make government more
efficient and responsive; instituting "Citistat" a government
accountability program that helps make local government more
responsive, efficient, and less costly; removing lights from the
Lloyd Expressway; equitable pay for police officers and city
workers; establishing a new Zoning Code adhering more closely to the
master plan; making Evansville a magnet for high tech industry;
supporting local schools and universities; and the completion of
I-69 and a suitable bypass around Evansville.
Joseph Kernan
Joseph Kernan attended the University of Notre Dame on an athletic
scholarship, playing baseball. He graduated in 1968 with a degree in
government. In 1969, he enlisted in the Navy as a Naval Flight
Officer. He served as a Reconnaissance Attack Navigator, flying 26
missions over Laos and North Vietnam. On May 7, 1972, his plane was
shot down and Kernan was captured, beaten and held as a prisoner of
war in Hanoi for 11 months. After his release, he continued on
active duty until 1974.
After returning to civilian life, Kernan worked in the private and
public sectors, including serving as mayor of South Bend.
In 1996, Kernan was asked by gubernatorial candidate Frank
O’Bannon to be his running mate. Kernan
was sworn in as governor after Gov. O'Bannon suffered a massive
stroke and died on September 13, 2003. After a hard-fought
2004 gubernatorial campaign, Mitch Daniels was elected with 53
percent of the vote to Kernan's 45 percent. Kernan left office on
Jan. 10, 2005.
Jeff Kniese
Jeff D. Kniese has served on the Vanderburgh County Council since
2001. He is a Senior Vice President of Mortgage Banking at Integra
Bank Corporation. Prior to joining Integra in 2001, he spent over 14
years with Old National Bank holding several positions in retail
lending and insurance with his last position as Vice President
responsible for their corporate-wide life and health insurance
division. Prior to Old National he spent two years with Morris Plan
& Thrift.
James H. Madison
James H. Madison is the Thomas and Kathryn Miller Professor of
History and former chair of the Department of History, Indiana
University, Bloomington. Among his publications are The Indiana
Way: A State History; Eli Lilly: A Life; A Lynching in the
Heartland: Race and Memory in America; Bloomington: Past & Present
(with Scott Sanders and Will Counts), and Slinging Doughnuts for
the Boys: An American Woman in World War II.
Professor Madison's teaching has ranged from the freshman
introductory history course to courses on Indiana history and on
World War II and seminars on automobile culture and on leaders and
leadership. He serves also as director of the Liberal Arts and
Management Program (LAMP), an honors-level program that offers
majors in the College of Arts and Sciences courses in cooperation
with the Kelley School of Business and special LAMP seminars.
In 1994, the University awarded Professor Madison the Sylvia E.
Bowmen Distinguished Teaching Award. He has also taught, as a
Fulbright Professor, at Hiroshima University, Japan, and at the
University of Kent, Canterbury, England. He is the recipient of the
Indiana Historical Society's Hoosier Historian Award and has been a
fellow at Harvard University, the Newberry Library, and the
Huntington Library. In 2001 the Organization of American Historians
named Professor Madison a Distinguished Lecturer.
Cheryl Musgrave
Cheryl Musgrave was appointed
commissioner of the Department of Local Government Finance by
Governor Mitch Daniels on July 13, 2007. Mrs. Musgrave brings more
than a decade of public service experience to her role in overseeing
local government for the state of Indiana. Mrs. Musgrave was
elected as Vanderburgh County Commissioner for District Three in
2004 and became president of the Vanderburgh County Commission in
2005.
From 1995 until being sworn in as County Commissioner in 2005, Mrs.
Musgrave was County Assessor for Vanderburgh County. As assessor,
Mrs. Musgrave led the way in providing access to public information
over the Internet for free by establishing the first Indiana Web
site with assessment information. She was the first Vanderburgh
County official to introduce the live Internet streaming of public
hearings. She championed the county and city’s powerful joint
Geographic Information System (GIS) project, which required the
digital re-mapping of the entire county. Her efforts culminated in a
free online map connected to assessment and sales information. The
GIS project required three levels of local government to cooperate
(city, county, and township) and provide funding.
During her two and a half terms as County Assessor, Mrs. Musgrave
was active in working with her colleagues in county government in
Vanderburgh County and across the state. She served on the
Legislative Committee of the Association of Indiana Counties and was
Legislative Co-Chairman of the County Assessor Association.
Mrs. Musgrave is a 1979 graduate of DePauw University and a graduate
of the Lugar Series of Excellence. She is married to Bob Musgrave
and is the mother of two children.
Mizell
Stewart III
Mizell Stewart III, Editor, Evansville Courier & Press is a
veteran newspaper journalist who has coordinated coverage of such
high-profile news events as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and
the deadlocked 2000 presidential elections, has been editor of the
Evansville
Courier & Press since
2007.
Stewart came to Evansville from the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal
where he served as managing editor. Before
moving to Akron, Stewart was a consultant for the former Knight
Ridder newspapers. While in that role, he helped lead a team of
Knight Ridder journalists who coordinated coverage of Hurricane
Katrina’s aftermath at the
Sun-Herald in Biloxi, Miss. The newspaper’s coverage won the
2006 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
Stewart also is the former editor of the
Tallahassee (Fla.) Democrat
where he directed several award-winning reporting
efforts, including the newspaper’s coverage of the deadlocked 2000
presidential election and an in-depth examination of Florida’s
foster care system. Stewart began his newspaper career in
1982 as a 16-year-old summer intern and is a journalism graduate of
Bowling Green State University.
He has lectured at The E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio
University and in the Department of Journalism at Bowling Green
State University. He has given presentations on leadership,
management, reporting, and diversity for the American Press
Institute, the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, the American
Society of Newspaper Editors, the National Writers Workshops,
Investigative Reporters & Editors, the National Association of Black
Journalists and the World Journalism Institute. He was a Pulitzer
Prize juror in 2001 and 2002. In 2007, Stewart was named a McCormick
Tribune Fellow by the National Association of Minority Media
Executives and attended the Advanced Executive Program at
Northwestern University.
Tony Wolfe
Tony Wolfe has been on the Gibson County Council since
2000, and is currently President of that body. He is the immediate
past president of the Indiana County Council Association, an
affiliate of the Association of Indiana Counties.
He serves on Congressman Brad Ellsworth’s agriculture
committee. His area of
special interest is studying property taxes and their impact on
Rural Indiana. He has spoken to thousands of people in the last
several years concerning re-assessment, tax restructuring, and the
political implications of tax law in Indiana, in a presentation
called “Property Tax 101”.
It is a simple presentation designed to teach taxpayers how
to read and analyze their property tax statements to insure they are
getting the correct tax bill. More recently, his presentations have
focused on the implications of tax caps to local units, the shift in
tax burdens to different property classes, and the “unintended
consequences” of well-intentioned legislation created by the General
Assembly in Indiana.
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