The Porter County Board of Commissioners approved the purchase of nine new vehicles for the sheriff’s department for the coming year after some discussion about why commissioners are footing the brunt of the bill.
The vehicles, with equipment and installation, come in at just over $400,000. The sheriff’s department has $50,000 toward the cost of the vehicles and commissioners have a $325,000 budget for the purchase, leaving a difference of more than $26,000.
“I don’t know if we want to spare any more money,” Commissioners President Jeff Good, R-Center, said during the meeting, held online with Commissioner Jim Biggs, R-North, absent because he is recovering from COVID-19.
County attorney Scott McClure said the vehicles have come out of the commissioners budget, usually out of local income tax funds, for years, and the County Council started putting some money in a sheriff’s department line item so the department has some money toward the purchase.
The department started buying about nine cars a year a few years ago, McClure said, and they are usually ordered in the spring and arrive in the late fall. The sheriff’s sale of surplus vehicles also is held then and that money rolls back into the purchase of the cars.
The funds for the cars would come out of the 2021 budget, he added.
“I would like to see all of this move to the council’s budget because they’re the ones with oversight. It’s like a fish out of water,” Good said.
He added he knows the sheriff’s department would still have to come to commissioners to approve the contract but he would prefer if all of the money was available.
He and Commissioner Laura Blaney, D-South, approved the request with the caveat that no additional money would come from commissioners
In other business, commissioners approved a one-year contract with Northwest Health Porter for ambulance service with the understanding that they will use the coming year to explore other options.
The current five-year agreement, McClure said, expires at the end of the year and the county entered into negotiations with Northwest to have a contract for another year, with some previous issues in the contract cleaned up.
“We were able to hold the costs the same, so that was a real positive,” he said.
The contract is for $450,000, as it has been for the past couple of years. Commissioners renegotiated the current contract previously, bringing the cost down $1.5 million over a few years, Good said.
The ambulance service serves unincorporated Porter County and parts of its cities and towns, McClure said.
“This gives us a year of a runway to start to figure out how we want to set up for the next 20 or 30 years,” he said, adding it’s also a springboard for a 2022 contract. “Obviously we’re going to have a lot of work with the cities and the towns and the trustees, potentially” about the contract and how it’s funded.
The county has had a contract with the hospital for the service since the county owned the hospital and wanted people to go there, Good said, and when the county sold the hospital in 2007, “that sort of changed things.”
Northwest now has competition with other hospitals in the county, Good said, adding he looks forward to working with the county and Northwest to come up with something that works for everybody without losing the county’s current level of service.
“This is a slow roll because this is public safety,” he said.
Additionally, commissioners approved a memorandum of understanding between the Expo Center and the Porter County Health Department for distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine year when mass distribution becomes available.
The measure was passed in tandem with another one required before the vaccine could be distributed there.
“We have the plan in place, we have the venue in place. We’re in pretty good shape,” Blaney said.
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