Sometimes you have to spend money to make money. Porter County Assessor Sue Neff and Porter County Sheriff Jeff Balon got buy-in from the Porter County Council on that adage Tuesday night as they were collectively approved for $185,500 in additional expenditures that are expected to see a return on that investment down the road.
Neff sought and was unanimously approved to spend $100,000 on contractual services to hire a vendor to assist in a reassessment of the county’s commercial and industrial parcels this year, while also training two county staffers to conduct the work in-house in the future.
“We know that our commercial values are low, but we didn’t know how to get them up and defend them,” Neff told the council.
She expects the vendor assistance to raise the commercial and industrial valuations by $7 million to $18 million. With approval from the council, Neff said she will now seek permission from the Porter County Board of Commissioners to put the work out for bid.
The reassessment period runs from May 1 to Dec. 31. “In my office, we vow to be fair and equitable to all Porter County taxpayers and right now, because the commercial is low, the residential is bearing the brunt of that,” Neff said.
She said the county is currently preparing to appear before the Indiana Board of Tax Review regarding the assessment for Menards. “It’s going to be expensive,” she said of the legal battle.
For his part, Balon was unanimously granted an additional $85,500 to spend on contractual services with Summerill Consultants, a company that will help the Porter County Jail negotiate a better daily reimbursement rate from the federal government for housing federal inmates. Former Sheriff David Reynolds began working with the company three years ago and got the per diem raised quite a bit at that time, Balon said.
Council Vice President Red Stone, R-1st, had heard of the company and said they were the only firm he was aware of that had the approval of the Federal Office of Management and Budget to engage in such work. “Pretty much they have the lock on doing this,” he said.
“They say they’ll get us up to a minimum of $90 per day,” Balon told the council. That’s a significant increase over the $75 per day the jail currently receives. The new rate is expected to kick in by August.
Balon expects to increase revenues for the jail by $515,000 over the next three years, with the money put back into operating expenses that pay for everything from groceries to pensions for staff.
The federal prisoners are predominantly violent offenders from around the country. The percentage of the jail’s daily prison population made up of federal prisoners varies from day to day but ranges between 55% and 60%.
“There’s some in there for murder,” Balon said. “We have a pod that is strictly for the federal inmates.” The current count of all inmate populations is around 160 per day.
Shelley Jones is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
