Complaints by Lake County Commissioners that Lake County Sheriff Oscar Martinez Jr. is not following the rules when it comes to purchasing have been met with counter complaints the governing body is slow walking much needed maintenance to crucial equipment.

The power struggle between the Commissioners and Martinez continues to simmer months after the Indiana Supreme Court denied a request to transfer a case from the Indiana Court of Appeals decided in November that sided with Martinez in a battle over who had the authority to enter into contracts for health care and other related inmate services.

Commissioners at their meeting Wednesday said that the sheriff’s department did not follow the required procedure to make an emergency purchase after approving payment of $16,314 to repair fuel pumps. Martinez in interviews via email Thursday and Friday said he has been urging the body to act on the pumps for more than a year and the failure to act placed all vehicles from a variety of county departments in jeopardy.

Northern Indiana Mechanical conducts the required annual inspection of the fuel system. Following the April 2022 inspection, the company submitted a report documenting the problems with the aging fuel system. That report was submitted to commissioners in May, Martinez said.

“The pumps stopped working (in November 2022) and we had to perform an override to the computer system to ensure that all county government vehicles would be provided fuel,” Martinez said, adding that the override was a temporary solution.

Once the override was conducted, the pump system had about 500 fill ups left. Martinez said the computer component that tracks the fill ups also does not work, so it was difficult to determine when the pumps would ultimately fail. Martinez notified commissioners via email of the problem in November.

The invoice paid by commissioners Wednesday takes care of the repair work completed by Northern Indiana Mechanical in November.

Matthew Fech, commissioners’ attorney, and Commissioner Michael Repay, D-Hammond, said in interviews after the meeting if the repairs were an emergency, the sheriff’s department had to follow the process outlined by statute to make those repairs. That process is to alert the president of the executive body — in this case Repay — and attempt to obtain two price quotes for the work.

“It’s not as though the board of commissioners are ignoring what needs to be done; it needs to be done in the proper fashion,” Fech said.

In the May and September emails sent from the sheriff to the commissioners, Chief of Police Vince Balbo outlines the dire conditions of the system such as sediment in the tanks, rusting fuel tanks, crumbling concrete pads, outdated software running on no longer supported Windows XP and other matters, but did not request an emergency declaration at that time.

“As winter approaches, I cannot understate my concerns that, ‘It’s a matter of when, not if — we may experience a catastrophic fuel system equipment failure,’ that will have a direct impact on our ability to provide fuel to all departments that depend on these pumps as their only source for motor fuel,” Balbo wrote to in a Sept. 27 email to Fech. Copies of these emails were provided to the Post Tribune by Martinez.

In his comments, Martinez said that in emails sent on Nov. 9 and 10 to Fech, the department requested information on how to go about the emergency procurement process. He said the first email request getting commissioners permission to support the emergency request. The following day Martinez said the department again contacted the commissioners through Fech, saying they would be contacting him again with an estimate for the purpose of seeking permission to move forward with the emergency repair/remediation.