Portage Mayor Austin Bonta isn’t following the “what have you done for me lately” mantra, he said in his State of the City address Thursday. “I’m in the ‘what have you done for my child’s future’ business,” he said.
“How are we setting up our city now so that our children who are growing up here now want to stay or want to come back or feel comfortable coming back,” he said at the Woodland Park luncheon hosted by the Greater Portage Chamber of Commerce.
The city is seeing business growth, signs that what his administration has been doing in the past year is starting to pay off, he said.
“We will be a city that grows. It will not be a city that grows stagnant or smaller,” Bonta said.
Before 2003, and to some extent afterward, residents were talking about a lot of empty storefronts in the city.
“In the last year, we saw a lot of those storefronts being filled,” he said. Among them is Hot Body Pilates, which he said is drawing people to Portage so they don’t have to go as far as Merrillville to do those exercises.
“People like the convenience of being able to shop local,” which slows traffic because residents aren’t racing to get out of town to hit the stores, restaurants and other businesses they want to patronize, Bonta said.
“What we are starting to see is that success breeds success,” he said.
Bonta talked about the owner of On the Roxx, an entertainment venue in the Portage Mall, reviewing plans for the downtown the city is developing north of Central Avenue between Hamstrom and Willowcreek roads.
“Where’s our building?” the business owner asked.
“Somehow, the artist just keeps forgetting it’s there,” Bonta said, or perhaps anticipates those Portage Mall buildings being razed.
“We don’t operate like that,” he said. Instead, the city has been meeting with Portage Mall property owners to develop a plan to pave the parking lot that “kind of looks like the surface of the moon sometimes” with all its craters, he said.
“We’re starting to see that life, that dove with an olive branch coming into that mall,” Bonta said in reference to the Noah’s Ark story in which the dove was dispatched to see if the flooding was easing.
Now the mall is a big part of plans for the downtown being created, he said.
The mall isn’t the only area where economic rebirth is happening, Bonta said. “We have had so many developers come to our city in the last year” who had given up on the city because it was too hard to get projects done five or 10 years ago, he said.
Bonta told of being 17 or 18 years old and heading to college, not expecting to be able to return to Portage for a successful career. He hopes teens will find it easier to return to Portage in the future and find that success.
A strong partnership with Portage Township Schools is helping make that happen.
School Superintendent Amanda Alaniz was Bonta’s first principal when he was a first-year teacher, he said.
“Amanda had a lot of great ideas from the start,” he said, including setting up a human resources department and a robust information technology push, when he met with her after his election in 2023.
Wilma Velazquez, vice president of the School Board and a member of the city’s Redevelopment Commission, has also been helpful, he said. The school district had an agreement to pay the salaries of school resource officers, employees of the city’s police department, but hadn’t been paying them because the city hadn’t been sending bills for them. That’s now resolved.
The RDC also had $100,000 budgeted for education grants each year, but that money hadn’t been spent because no application system was in place. This year, for the first time, that application system will be in place, Bonta said.
The city also partnered with the school district in the creation of the city’s 20th park, Miami Park, at the intersection of Lute and Airport roads. The city is leasing the land from the school district.
Assistant Park Superintendent John Harrison found grant money for a fitness area that could only be used at a new park, so the city made it happen, Bonta said.
At the other 19 parks, deferred maintenance has long been an issue with only five people assigned to maintain them. Even the sidewalk in front of the maintenance facility had weeds, a sure sign of trouble, Bonta said.
He also saw playground equipment that had been broken for as long as he could remember.
“What we needed was to get our parks in physical shape,” so the city expects to hire two additional people for the maintenance staff, Bonta said.
The farmers market was another area where his staff offered advice for improvement. Planning and Development Director Tom Cherry and Chief of Staff Lee Ann Van Curen spotted an issue right away: “It’s a farmers market, but there are no farmers there.”
The event draws a large crowd each time it’s held. “There’s an excitement there; there’s an energy there,” Bonta said. “People now have a memory that they want to return.”
As that energy builds in Portage, former residents are taking notice and moving back.
“We are building a community where people who want to move here, they make it their hometown,” he said.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
