The Portage City Council approved shifting control over unsafe buildings from the building inspector to the planning director.
The ordinance approved on Sept. 3 allows the building commissioner to conduct an inspection but the planning director will determine if a violation will be assessed against the owner. The idea is to share the powers rather than having the inspector deal with it all.
Three members of the council – Victoria Vasquez, Penny Ambler and Melissa Weidenbach – were absent.
When the ordinance was introduced in August, Mayor Austin Bonta said he wanted to speed up action on unsafe buildings.
When the council doesn’t assign responsibility for the task to a specific department, it falls on the mayor to deal with, Bonta said. This ordinance gives the council input into how it’s handled.
Councilwoman Gina Giese-Hurst said last month that before taking office, “It takes forever to get it condemned.”
In other business, Bonta said residents have asked about what looks like filling potholes with rocks. “Although it might look like gravel, it’s not,” he said.
Street Superintendent Randy Reeder said it’s part of a new patching process for filling potholes. An emulsion material is injected into the pothole and surrounding area and stone is added to fill the hole. That means filling the hole just once instead of repeatedly adding asphalt patches as the material gets kicked out of the hole.
The city bought a $90,000 machine last year that allows the city to do this. It saves time and money for the road crews to get it done just once, Reeder said.
A lot of potholes pop up in the city as water seeps into cracks and freezes, he said.
“This is a great procedure that we use to make those roads last a little bit longer until our next cycle of repaving happens,” Reeder said. “One of the frustrating parts is in just throwing cold patch in a hole through that cold and hot cycle during the winter time, it pops out, squeezes it like toothpaste, and then we’re going back to that same hole four or five, sometimes six, times within that season.”
“We fill that patch out with this special mixture, and we never go back to them,” he said. “It’s a little bit more expensive, but the time that we save, that we can focus on other areas improves.”
Bonta asked about loose material around the hole. That can happen when an employee is being trained on the process, Reeder said. “When you put too much loose stone on a patch, that’s when it happens.”
Police Chief Michael Candiano said with three new officers sworn in last week, the department still had four openings. It takes time to train new officers, so the department hopes to hire officers from other departments looking to make a lateral move to Portage.
“There was a lot of really good police work done in the last month,” Candiano said as he recognized officers for outstanding efforts.
One of the calls involved a mentally ill individual at the end of the pier at Portage Lakefront Park, he said. “Without going into too much detail, they basically were trying to negotiate with them trying to get them to seek some treatment, at which point he produced a handgun.”
“You know there is nowhere to go, so our officers took cover,” Candiano said. “They did a fantastic job continuing to talk to this individual. Unfortunately, he made the decision to try to harm himself.”
“I gotta tell you, I watched this video, and our guys that were out there went from officer safety to trying to negotiate with them to immediately rendering first aid as soon as it got to that point,” he said.
Their cars were far away from the end of that pier, so they improved with what they could find around them to patch the wound. “I believe it’s a happy ending because it sounds like that individual survived and was able to hopefully get the help he needs,” Candiano said.
He also mentioned a child soliciting case involving an 11-year-old. Portage’s detective bureau coordinated with police in Fishers. Portage’s team went there to pick up the suspect, Candiano said.
“Chief, this was just a summer of heroism,” Bonta said. “It was a month that felt like a year.”
Fire Chief Chris Crail also complimented the police department. “The calls they are going on are escalating in severity,” he said. “The situations their officers are getting into almost daily are becoming more common than we all realized. They do an amazing job. They’re an amazing team, and they continue to shine throughout the city.”
His department got word that it is receiving a port security grant to upgrade sonar, electronics, motors and more on the department’s dive team boat. “It will come back essentially a brand new boat come springtime,” he said. “Anybody who owns a boat knows that boat problems are not cheap problems.”
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.