Accountability

Editor, Times-Union:
Over the past few weeks, Kosciusko County officials have taken several important steps involving the county’s Flock camera program. The cameras have come down. The County Council stopped future funding. The commissioners declared the Flock contract invalid and dissolved the Flock Donation Fund.
Those were the right corrective steps.
But correcting something after it is discovered is not the same thing as accountability for how it happened.
County attorney Ed Ormsby told the commissioners that the five-year Flock contract, signed in January 2024 and amended in March 2025, was executed solely by the Kosciusko County prosecutor. It was not approved by the commissioners, was not reviewed by the county attorney and was not issued in the name of the county. His conclusion was straightforward: The prosecutor did not have the authority to bind the county to that multi-year contract.
Yet the county paid $70,500 in 2024, another $70,500 in 2025 and another $70,500 in 2026.
That deserves an explanation.
Then there is Fund 4912, the Flock Donation Fund.
The ordinance creating that fund in April 2023 specifically stated that expenditures could be made “without appropriation.”
This was not a new rule that appeared in 2026. Indiana law has reserved county appropriation authority to the County Council since 1980, and the State Board of Accounts has been reminding counties of that requirement for decades.
So residents deserve answers to some basic questions.
How was an unauthorized five-year contract allowed to obligate hundreds of thousands of dollars in county funds? How did it get amended a year later without the problem being discovered? How were payments made for three consecutive years without the county’s contracting process catching it?
And how did an ordinance get passed in 2023 specifically authorizing expenditures without appropriation when Indiana law had reserved that authority to the County Council for more than four decades?
This is not personal. It is not meant to embarrass anyone, hurt anyone or assign motives that we cannot know.
It is about accountability.
When government gets something wrong, especially when public money and legal authority are involved, residents should be able to expect more than a correction after the fact. We should be told what happened, who was responsible for the decisions that were made, why the safeguards failed and what will be done to make sure it does not happen again.
That is not an unreasonable demand. It is part of having confidence in local government.
The public raised these questions. The facts ultimately showed that the concerns were legitimate.
Now we deserve accountability.
Chris Plack
Warsaw, via email