The Lake County Council approved Tuesday the 2025 fiscal year budget for the South Shore Convention and Visitors Authority in a 6-1 vote, with Councilman Randy Niemeyer, R-Cedar Lake, voting against the budget.
SSCVA Chief Financial Officer Nicole Wolverton said the SSCVA board of directors approved a resolution for its 2025 fiscal year budget of $6,614,000, which is a $15,000 increase from the SSCVA’s 2024 budget.
SSCVA CEO Phil Taillon said the county’s innkeeper tax has increased month over month for the last nine months, which he said proves tourism is strong in Lake County. The SSCVA also made a change to its insurance, which will save the agency $60,000 annually without changing employee benefits, he said.
“Those are the types of things that we’re going to be looking at going forward,” Taillon said. “Decreasing expenses, a lean budget, efficient, balanced budget every year.”
The council gave final approval to the budget Tuesday, after voting through both the first and second readings of the budget. A new state law requires the county to approve the SSCVA budget, said Lake County Finance Director Scott Schmal.
Niemeyer, who voted against the budget on both readings, said he did so because he needed more information about the 2025 budget. Niemeyer asked Taillon about what revenue sources the SSCVA has.
Taillon said the two biggest revenue sources are the innkeepers tax and casino revenues. Wolverton said other sources of revenue are the gift shop at the Indiana Welcome Center and partnerships for various events, like the Gary Air Show.
Niemeyer said he’d like to see a line item breakdown of the revenue sources and a historical look at the SSCVA budget.
“Right now, we’ve got this budget, which is just a graph, but I’d love to look at comparisons and line items. We do that here always in budgeting,” Niemeyer said.
Wolverton said the 2025 budget was created in a new format, but that Gateway, Indiana’s online finance portal, has previous SSCVA budget information.
Councilman Charlie Brown, D-Gary, asked about lawsuits against the SSCVA and how the lawsuits will impact the agency’s bottom line. Taillon said the SSCVA is involved in “one larger lawsuit right now that’s pretty well known” that has impacted the SSCVA’s budget.
The SSCVA has spent almost a quarter of a million dollars for one of the law firms involved in its lawsuit with former SSCVA President and CEO Speros Batistatos. In August 2022, a month after being fired, Batistatos sued the SSCVA alleging it violated the law in the handling of his contract renegotiations due to his age as well as misspent federal Payroll Protection Plan funds in violation of the CARES Act, a claim the board disputes.
A Post-Tribune analysis of some of the legal bills the tourism agency has racked up in the litigation reveals that it has so far paid $237,835.80 between 2021 and now to Indianapolis-based Barnes and Thornburg, which is representing the SSCVA as an entity.
The SSCVA budgeted $150,000 in its legal line item for 2025, though it’s able to make appropriations from other funds in its approximately $6,614,000 2025 budget.
On Tuesday, Taillon said the lawsuit does impact the SSCVA’s bottom line.
“I’ve only been here five months now, and every month I have to sit down with my CFO and decide where are we going to pull funds from to put into the attorney’s fees column because we didn’t have enough. For 2025, we increased that for obvious reasons. It does have an effect on us, but because we’re looking at decreasing expenses and because for nine months in a row now the innkeepers revenue has gone up, we’re still very strong as an organization,” Taillon said.
akukulka@post-trib.com
