I agree with Paula Hughes: Compared with essential city services like police and fire, leaf pickup is a luxury.

And I also agree with Tom Henry: Residents expect the leaf service, and if it stops, costly problems could result.

But I didn’t expect leaf pickup to blow up into a campaign issue last week. There are a lot more important issues.

With caps limiting property tax revenues that are the main source of money for Indiana’s cities, Fort Wayne will in the future – not next year, but maybe in a few years – be faced with either stiff cutbacks in services or an income tax increase or both. If voters want less government, officials need to start contemplating which services to cut. Hughes did not say leaf pickup should end. But she did ask whether leaf pickup, as handy as it is, should be on the table, and she is right to raise the issue.

Henry defended the leaf pickup program last week and used the opportunity to attack Hughes. The state Democratic Party followed up with a mailing to potential voters late last week with the headline screaming “PAULA HUGHES SAYS SHE’D STOP LEAF PICKUP BY THE CITY.” That simply isn’t true, and the party did a disservice to voters by stretching the truth so far as to break it. And for the record, Henry himself cut back the program – from three annual pickups to two – his first year in office.

The Henry campaign also accused Hughes of cutting back snow removal when she was on Allen County Council in 2007. Hughes reacted angrily, accusing the mayor of lying about the snow removal.

The county commissioners took the unusual step of responding to a campaign accusation as part of their official government duties, instructing their spokesman to issue a news release on county letterhead that stated the county did cut 19 county highway department workers but “at no time has the removal of snow or ice from County highways been cut, eliminated or reduced in priority.”

But that wasn’t their story four years ago, when their spokeswoman said that because of the job cuts, the county would send 10 to 12 fewer trucks out to plow. After meeting with county highway officials on Nov. 16, 2007, school transportation officials said they were planning on crews taking an additional hour to clear main county roads.

Here’s what the commissioners didn’t say: The county had more than 10 years to plan for the Aboite annexation, and the county auditor had sounded the warning years before that a major cut in funding was coming. But county officials treated the funding cut at the time as a sudden emergency.