I’m not local, so I’m struggling to understand it too. Cumberland has its own town council and various boards and commissions that handle everything from parks to zoning to sanitation. On some planning-related matters, the town government must defer to the Indianapolis city-county government to a greater extent than most Indiana towns defer to their county governments – as long as it pertains to the part of town within Marion County. Otherwise, Cumberland is legally like any other Indiana town. As far as I know, all the other included towns have the same relationship to Indianapolis.
If I visit that part of town, am I inside or outside of Indianapolis? Naïvely, I would consider the “Indianapolis Welcomes You” sign several blocks down U.S. 40 and think I’m still outside Indianapolis. In Indiana, all streets within municipal boundaries are maintained by the municipality – Cumberland in this case – so naturally Indianapolis only puts up its sign once you get onto a city-maintained street. Anyways, city limit signs are only so helpful in this part of Indiana. Indianapolis seems to have prioritized signposting its borders with Carmel to the north and Greenwood to the south, while the only Cumberland welcome sign is well inside Hancock County, bolted onto one of the county’s many school district limit signs. (Yes Virginia, school districts are verifiable on the ground too.)
IndyGIS, the GIS department for Indianapolis and Marion County, has a My Neighborhood application that provides basic community information about the entire county, including the excluded towns. The tool reports that an address outside of Cumberland, such as 1000 CUMBERLAND RD, lies within Indianapolis, as expected:
If you enter an address just up the street in Cumberland, such as 100 N MUESSING ST, it reports just Cumberland as the city or town instead:
Similarly, IndyGIS’s “Cities and Towns” layer corresponds to the Census Bureau’s “Indianapolis balance”, excluding the excluded towns as well as the included towns. This layer seems definitive, but is it reliable for our purposes?
The distinction between included and excluded towns seems like a meaningful one, but if Cumberland and the other included towns are actually independent of Indianapolis from a territorial standpoint, regardless of the governments’ obligations to each other, then I’d favor excluding Cumberland and the other included towns from Indianapolis, aligning Indianapolis with the Census Bureau’s “Indianapolis balance”. This would save us the trouble of fudging the admin_level=* tags and the boundary ways. Hopefully I’m not missing the forest for the trees as a non-local.