Three Porter County Republicans are vying for a spot on the November ballot to replace South District Commissioner Laura Blaney, a Democrat who is not seeking reelection for that post.
The winner will face Democrat Dan Whitten in the fall; he is a former longtime member of the county council and is unopposed in the primary.
In the midst of his fifth term Porter Township Trustee Ed Morales is focused on three issues: public safety, drainage, and zoning. “They’re just concerned that their voice in Porter County has fallen on deaf ears,” he said of his constituents.
A Lake County native, Morales moved to Porter County nearly 30 years ago and got involved in efforts to stop a landfill in Porter Township. Of 1,008 townships Morales said Porter Township has been named Indiana Township of the Year by the Indiana Township Association twice under his tenure.
He lobbied with the Indiana Volunteer Firefighters Association for changes to service requirements. They are hard for people with full-time jobs to fulfill and the group is hoping to enact in-house training and other workarounds to help communities combat the shortage of volunteer firefighters.
Morales said Porter Township contracts its fire service with the Boone Grove Fire Department. “They’ll look at you and say, ‘I’ll do it as long as you will,’” he said of the firefighters there.
A journeyman machinist by trade, Morales specializes in the set-up of machine shops from scratch for the electric motor industry. He said government differs vastly from the private sector. “You have to really know what you’re doing,” he said. “It comes down to experience when you’re electing these public officials.”
He said things are coming to a head in the county now due to past leaders who “just kept kicking the can down the road a little bit” rather than taking advantage of opportunities from the state to fix things “when the money was cheap.”
Corrie Sharp just moved back to the area in August of 2022, but the licensed landscape architect and certified urban planner is well-versed in county planning. She said she wrote the Hamilton County Comprehensive Plan and zoning codes as president and CEO of her planning and redevelopment company.
She ran for state senate in 2018 while living in Carmel and started a political action committee – Elect Republican Women – in 2019. She would like to see a diversity of gender, race and income on the county’s boards.
The Boone Grove High School graduate now lives on the Porter County side of Lakes of the Four Seasons and is in favor of the formation of a fire protection district there. “We are an agrarian community despite our population centers,” she said. “We are feeling sprawl from other counties that are moving in.”
She said it’s important as a community to be asking questions such as what importance Porter County places on agriculture. Sharp feels her background working with municipalities, universities, community development corporations, and nonprofits is a strength. “I bring the actual educated, professional background to the commission.”
She would like to see the county “not just be reactionary,” but plan for the next four, or even 20 years, keeping infrastructure development ahead of growth and the ability to keep out certain industries. While she says “I am all about property owners having their rights to make money,” the proposed Malden Solar Farm is “not the economic development tool that the industry promotes.” She feels solar is not as sophisticated as other mechanisms of energy production.
Dean Moretton, another Lake County native who’s been in Porter County since 2000, would like to see if the cost-sharing ideas he witnesses in his globe-trotting private-sector career can be brought to government. “Look at the 911 center, right?” he offers up as one example. “That’s a shared resource. Everybody used to do it separately.”
An electrical engineer with an MBA, Moretton has started and sold several companies and said he’s been “exposed to quite a bit of problem-solving” over the course of developing and selling demand-response software around the world. “What about cybersecurity? Where’s the talent to address these things?”
The Morgan Township resident would also like to see more collaboration between the county and local municipalities, including efforts between them to develop long-term plans. “If you don’t have a long-term plan, you do whack-a-mole on problems,” he said.
“If you’ve got qualified people working collaboratively together, the solution’s way better than any one person’s thought,” Moretton said.
He thinks the consolidated city-county government structure of Indianapolis and its home county of Marion is something Porter County should consider. “Could it work here?” he asked. “Who knows, but it takes the analysis.”
Moretton would also like to bring the cost-saving practices of business to government. The county, he said, for example, has a lot of part-time employees. The private sector is seeing employee sharing.
Could the county be run like a corporation with one central manager? “The board has one employee (the CEO) and then the CEO has all the other employees,” Moretton said.
Shelley Jones is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
