The Portage City Council approved 6% raises for the police department on Tuesday.
More Top Picks School Accommodations For Sensory Processing Disorder
The Fraternal Order of Police members approved the union contract last week. Their raises will be reflected a week from Friday, with back pay for the retroactive raises to come later.
“It’s getting harder to be able to do raises in the city,” Mayor Austin Bonta said.
“We can’t necessarily promise that we’re always going to be able to raise amounts every year,” he said.
A 2025 state law restricting property tax revenue for local government has municipalities scrambling to find ways to cut spending and increase revenue to make up for the losses.
As he does whenever a collective bargaining agreement is before the council, member Ferdinand Alvarez asked Clerk-Treasurer Liz Modesto whether the city can afford the raises.
“We do have the money this year,” she said, thanks to local income tax money carried over from last year. After the raises, that fund will have about $199,000 in unappropriated money for the rest of the year.
“I’m praying that all the department heads stay within their budgets and we have no catastrophes,” Modesto said.
As with previous years, the city will have to issue tax anticipation warrants – essentially a payday loan for local governments – to get by until the first installment of property taxes is paid next year.
Last year, Bonta said, his staff and the clerk-treasurer’s office made a lot of cuts. “By the end of the year, we ended up with $1.8 million left over.”
At the time, he said if there were no huge snowstorms in 2026, the city would be OK. “By April, we had so many snowstorms we were not going to be able to make it through,” he said, so the city moved $350,000 to boost the motor vehicle highway fund, which covers street department operations.
“It’s going to be very, very tight going forward,” Modesto said.
What if there’s a catastrophe, Alvarez asked.
That would require a discussion about getting money from another source, Modesto said.
In other business, Police Chief Michael Candiano addressed a citizen complaint regarding Flock cameras at last month’s council meeting. Last month, Candiano said he wanted to look into the issue before responding.
“We do not make traffic stops based on Flock alone,” he said. The feed from a Flock camera might indicate a possible stolen car, for example, but it has to be independently verified.
“Flock does not have radars, at least ours don’t,” so police don’t issue tickets based on information from the cameras.
“You can avoid the Flock cameras if you really want to,” he said, by looking up where the cameras are located in the city and routing around them.
Candiano said the cameras have been valuable tools in fighting crimes that are hard to solve.
“Policing is becoming harder,” he said, and residents are becoming less cooperative.
On the Fourth of July, for example, there were 20 to 25 rounds of ammunition fired at Portage Lakefront and Riverwalk. “The only guy who calls us is the guy who got shot,” Candiano said, despite there being lots of people at that unit of Indiana Dunes National Park that day.
Bonta noted the upswell in the number of people online protesting the use of Flock cameras. “It seems like Flock, as a company, has a lot of features that a city can pay for,” he said, that Portage hasn’t paid for.
The police department has talked internally about other things Flock cameras can do. “I don’t think that we are really interested in any of those things at this time,” he said.
The information from Flock cameras is shared with Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District police, U.S. Marshals Service, Veterans Affairs police, postal inspectors, National Park Service rangers and the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Candiano said.
“I know this is probably one of several conversations we will have about Flock over the coming months,” he said.
The council also discussed a new policy on regulating public comments before kicking it to the Ordinance Committee for fine-tuning.
The new policy would set reasonable time restrictions, steps to maintain order and a procedure to warn attendees who disrupt meetings, City Attorney Dan Bortnicki said.
More Top Picks Best Tablets
“We see at some of these heated meetings police escorting people out. That is not necessarily an arrest. That is police escorting people out,” he said. “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”
Various council members offered input on how to amend the proposed resolution.
Last month, Councilwoman Melissa Weidenbach argued to add 30 seconds to the two-minute limit for individual public comment. Now she’s changed her mind.
“I really pushed to have that extra 30 seconds, but upon reflection, I don’t know if we should really be putting a time limit on our residents,” she said.
Earlier in the meeting, resident Michael Cooper spoke against the proposed policy, saying that limits on public comment could be mitigated at voting booths.
“I understand the potential headaches for our boards and commissions on contentious issues like data centers,” he said, but people should be heard.
Cooper was still talking when Bonta cut him off two minutes into his remarks.
Later, when the council was discussing the public comment policy, Bonta said, “I think it’s one thing for us to be here all night; it’s another thing for us to still be here Wednesday.”
“If we’re going to be here at 11 o’clock at night, so be it,” Weidenbach said.
Alvarez invited the public to the next Ordinance Committee meeting at 5:30 p.m. Aug. 4 at City Hall, before the next council meeting.
“As the chair of that committee, I’ll let you talk as long as you want,” he said.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.