Porter Township Trustee Ed Morales had a strong preliminary lead Tuesday night with 47% of his party’s votes and is expected to be certified by the county on May 17 as the Republican candidate for the 1st District seat on the Board of Commissioners in the November general election against Democrat Dan Whitten, a former longtime member of the county council.
The south county seat is being vacated by Commissioner Laura Blaney, a Democrat, when her term ends in December. She is not seeking reelection but is instead running uncontested on the Democratic ticket for Porter County treasurer. She’ll face off in November against Deputy Treasurer Jimmy Albarron, a Republican, for that office.
Morales was running against software developer Dean Moretton and landscape architect and urban planner Corrie Sharp. Moretton had a preliminary count of 32% of the vote and Sharp 20%, though those percentages were carved from a dismal voter turnout. Only 13% of the county’s 136,874 registered voters came out on Tuesday.
Morales’s campaign focused on public safety, drainage and zoning. “My passion is public safety,” he said. “It always has been.”
He would like to address specific public safety challenges such as, “How are we going to afford and keep police and fire?”
Creating jobs, however, is not the board’s job, he believes. “It’s serving the public,” Morales said, by understanding zoning, focusing on jails, courts, roads, and the 1,100-plus employees the county already has.
Morales was endorsed by Porter County Board of Commissioners President Jim Biggs, R-North, who ran for reelection unopposed on the Republican ticket in the primary, as well as Citizens Against Malden Solar.
He’s been Porter Township Trustee for 17 years and said his 9,600 constituents there and in the rest of south county feel unheard. “You have to be accessible and especially for my district that I’m running for, that hasn’t happened in a very long time,” Morales said, referring to Blaney.
He thinks she would have been better as a city official. “Her thing has been for many years the opera house and the arts, but that’s not what people in south county are concerned with,” Morales said.
Shelley Jones is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
