By Erik Potter, Post-Tribune staff writer
CROWN POINT -- A Lake County food and beverage tax gained an expected supporter Wednesday as the Regional Bus Authority passed a resolution officially endorsing the proposal.
RBA officials see the tax as the only realistic way to fund public busing on a county-wide basis. The tax has been bandied about for years as a revenue source for the county, but has never had the support it needed to be enacted. RBA members are counting on it having new political life next year in the face of the region's transit providers shutting down -- Northwest Indiana Community Action Corp. on Jan. 31 and Hammond Transit System on June 30 -- for lack of funding.
"If we don't (pass this tax), it's game over," said RBA board president Dennis Rittenmeyer. "There isn't anything else out there that we don't know about and haven't looked at. We keep coming back to the food and beverage tax."
The Lake County Council is expected to take the tax up at its January meeting. The 1 percent tax, which would apply to food and drinks purchased at restaurants and bars, is expected to raise about $7 million a year.
The Indiana General Assembly, when it authorized the tax for Lake County, specified that the money collected from it go directly to the Regional Development Authority, to be distributed as it saw fit.
Rittenmeyer said he is confident the RDA will devote the money to the RBA, which is one of the four priorities the RDA was established to fund.
Exactly what the $7 million would buy remains unclear. RBA Executive Director Tim Brown said that it would allow the RBA to operate a system that incorporates what is currently being offered in Lake County, with the addition of express bus routes to Chicago from Highland and Munster, but not much more than that.
Additionally, consolidating the existing services into the RBA would not be automatic. Future negotiations would have to determine whether and how the RBA would take over busing responsibility from existing agencies.
In other business, Brown reported that contract talks for creating an express bus service to Chicago in western Lake County, akin to the service currently being offered in Valparaiso, is making progress.
The RBA is hoping to offer daily express trips from Meijer in Highland and Community Hospital in Munster to downtown Chicago.
Bids considered for six daily trips came in between $4 million and $4.5 million for three years. The board is now looking at running only four trips, however, which would reduce that cost.