La PORTE — The La Porte County proposed .20 percent Emergency Medical Services (EMS) local income tax (LIT) hike has been killed.
With the EMS LIT hike shot down, which County Auditor Michael Rosenbaum said was proposed to create “a much more solvent county for the next two years,” Councilman Justin Kiel said the roughly $5.1 million the EMS LIT rate would have brought in will now have to be appropriated out of the county’s General Fund in January 2026.
And while the La Porte County Council, at their Oct. 27 meeting, had agreed, with a 4-2 vote, to pass the budget with the county’s 2025 numbers except for projected contractor services inflation, salary and benefit increases (not including overtime costs) and potential 2026 levy adoption – this motion was overturned by the council two days later on Oct. 30. Kiel and fellow Councilman Brett Kessler had cast the dissenting votes.
At their special meeting on Oct. 30, County Council, with a vote of 4-0, approved not only rescinding their Oct. 27 vote, but also adopting the 2026 budget that had been previously sent down to state on Oct. 6. Councilmen Mark Yagelski was absent, while Kiel was unable to vote due to being on Zoom.
“Now, for clarity’s sake, this is not including any kind of funding from any sort of LIT modification that was in the earlier portion of the ... Oct. 27th meeting,” Council President Adam Koronka said during the special meeting.
“This is just the spending figures that we had built into the budget,” he added.
Although the council’s original motion has since been rescinded, the notion behind it, according to Yagelski on Oct. 27, was to help “fix” the problem the county is currently facing with the drop in funding coming in because of the state’s adoption of Senate Enrolled Bill 1, which reduces the amount of property tax owed by property owners.
“We’re going to have to do something in the future. Stuff we already have is a base to start early enough next year to get to that point, so we don’t go and do what happened this year,” Yagelski said referring to the recently discussed EMS LIT rate hike.
“ ... we’re going to be forced in just two years to have some tax, whatever that tax is.
“ ... I love to hear everybody talk about it because our state legislators put us in the position that we’re in. I would hope that we all can ... find a way to work together so it works for us,” he added.
And while Koronka acknowledged that the original motion of adopting the 2025 county budget for 2026 was “a step backwards in the process,” he also believed that this would force the council “to regroup” and find better ways to manage the county.
However, Kiel called the Oct. 27 motion an “illusion” that would show that the council was “reducing the spending considerably, but not really.”
“ ... what we’re trying to do with the budget is to make sure that the amounts that we put in there reflect what we truly anticipate what the costs are going to be,” Kiel said.
And if the county’s non-negotiable costs – such as inmate food expenses, fueling and insurance – were to be “underbudget[ed],” Kiel said the council would only be “lying to ourselves in the short term in order to make it ... look like it works when in reality it’s not going to.”
“[The departments are] going to come back for additional appropriations later, [and] when those additional appropriations come back later, it’s hard for us to keep a running tally in our head [of] 100 plus items that might be under budgeted,” Kiel said.
“While it makes it look like the budget is growing, in reality, we were going to spend those amounts anyways, [so] we’re trying to incorporate them in there so then we can figure out what the true costs are then make cuts.
“We have to start somewhere, and if we don’t even know what the true expenses are, it’s impossible to move forward,” he added.
© Copyright 2025 LPHeraldDispatch.com