Porter County Chief Deputy Auditor Ryan Kubal said the 2025 General Fund, an incomplete work in progress as passed Monday night in a multi-part process, is looking good at $10.8 million thus far. “Right now, as of night two, looked good,” he said.
The budget approval process involves many hours of public meetings, beginning with a first reading that is read like a laundry list of proposed department budgets. Then a three-meeting second budget hearing is held to slog through the details with individual department heads.
State statute requires taxing bodies to adopt their budgets by Nov. 1 of each year. Assisting the effort has been a new series of budget workshops that the auditor’s office has held throughout the summer to work with department heads to streamline the process in advance of the budget hearings.
The 2024 budget was $47.2 million. State statute allows for the 2025 budget to go up $1,886,000 over the 2024 budget, bringing the 2025 budget target to $49.1 million.
Some departments, such as juvenile detention and the coroner’s office, faced long discussions, as is typically the case, despite the workshops. Juvenile Detention Center Director Alison Cox is having a hard time getting a new vehicle for the transport of the minors in her department’s care as they’re moved around the state.
“One of our vehicles doesn’t have heat and the other doesn’t have air,” Cox told the council of the two 2012 vehicles her department is using, a van bought by the Board of Commissioners and a Chevy Traverse donated by Judge Mary DeBoer who oversees juvenile justice in Porter County.
Cox, like every other department head, will have to wait on her request to add two additional juvenile probation officers as the council put a moratorium on new hires as it works through the budgeting process. DeBoer, who doesn’t expect to be part of the budgeting process in the future as she was recently appointed by Gov. Eric Holcomb to the Indiana Court of Appeals, explained how the role of juvenile detention officer has expanded while staff size hasn’t increased in a decade.
“The state mandated a risk and needs assessment to know what to focus on with each youth, but it’s more time-consuming,” she said. DeBoer explained that recent revisions to probation standards also require more engagement with, and services for, families as a whole.
“It’s very difficult to try to be on the lead and forefront on that when it’s exhausting to everybody,” DeBoer added. “We have people who are doing really amazing work or dying trying. It’s just getting tougher and the kids are getting tougher.”
“A lot of those kids are Porter County kids. They’re our kids,” added Council Vice President Red Stone, R-1st, who, along with other council members Sylvia Graham, D-At-Large, Andy Vasquez, R-4th, and Greg Simms, D-3rd, who serve as liaisons to the JDC and Health Department, are waiting to see at the Oct. 1 health department meeting what type of collaboration can be brought about to use Senate Bill 4 monies for such needs as an LPN for the kids housed at the JDC.
“It’s up to the health department, in my mind, to get this done,” Stone said. “If we can’t help then shame on any legislator that wrote SB4.”
Porter County Coroner Cyndi Dykes had to explain to the council why she was seeking a $25,000 increase for autopsies. “Why do the autopsies keep going up?” asked Councilman Andy Bozak, R-At-Large. “$270,000 is outrageous.
“We pay this guy a lot of money,” he added of forensic pathologist John Feczko. “Why aren’t you wheeling and dealing before you ask for the budget?”
Dykes said she’s spoken with Feczko and has an agreement that he can’t bill more than $22,500 per month, but she also explained how her hands are tied because Feczko is the only pathologist with privileges to perform autopsies at the morgue at Northwest Health-Porter.
“The county doesn’t have a morgue of its own,” she said. “I don’t have the ability to just bring in another pathologist.”
The number of autopsies the county will need is unpredictable but has been rising. Currently, Feczko is performing an average of 11 autopsies per month. The county also pays a morgue rental fee of $225 to the hospital for every autopsy performed.
The next budget hearing is at 5:30 p.m. Friday in the meeting chamber of the Porter County Administration Building, 155 Indiana Ave. in Valparaiso.
Shelley Jones is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.