After the Lake Ridge Volunteer Fire Department and its oversight board clashed over 2027 budget numbers, the Lake County Council approved next year’s numbers at their Tuesday meeting.
The district board and volunteer fire department didn’t make changes to the budget after disagreeing over its numbers back in September.
“The budget numbers that were presented to the council originally are exactly the ones that they approved,” said Trista Hudson, municipal advisor for Cender Dalton, who helps prepare the fire district’s annual budget. “The district did not request any changes.”
In Indiana, through the budget process, numbers can be changed but only by reduction.
“You can never increase the budget once it’s advertised,” Hudson said. “That has to do with making sure that the tax rate doesn’t increase.”
According to Post-Tribune archives, Fire Chief Marvin Pyle said the fire department’s budget is about $250,000, while the district’s emergency management services receive about $700,000.
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Pyle previously told the Post-Tribune that the EMS budget continues to increase while the fire department’s doesn’t.
“I’m getting frustrated with it,” Pyle previously said, “because it seems like the protection board is only here for the ambulance service, and they can’t give two craps about the fire department any more.”
Pyle was unable to immediately comment for this report.
The district receives several streams of revenue, including property tax dollars from the district’s homeowners, mostly in Calumet Township. Tax dollars are spent providing the fire service, Hudson said.
New revenues, including income tax money that the county can assign to different communities, cover the ambulance service, which was created in 2023. The service also tries to bring in its own revenue by ensuring medical billing is handled well and insurance companies are paying for provided ambulance services.
The district has a budget committee that meets with the fire department annually for its budget. This year, the fire department asked for an $100,000 increase to its budget. The protective district board “had a severe problem with the budget,” Board President Tim Kuiper previously told the Post-Tribune, saying it equated to 25% of the department’s budget.
Hudson didn’t speak with Pyle between the council’s first and second budget reading, she said.
“I can’t speak about what kind of conversations might have happened at the fire station and district offices,” she said. “The board is very involved in the operations, and the fire chief is at the station, I would imagine, pretty regularly.”
The board met Tuesday night, and Hudson went to talk through the numbers to make sure everyone was as informed as they could be. She hopes that eliminates any confusion about the budget numbers.
“We did go through details about the property taxes that the district collects,” Hudson said. “Those are assigned to the fire department budget, just like they always have been, that has never changed. … That’s been the board’s intention from day one of starting the ambulance service, that property taxes would stay where they were originally planned to be, and that the ambulance had to be funded by other sources.”