The Portage City Council is being asked to weigh in on NIPSCO's proposed electric rate hike.
Rev. Michael Cooper is a local pastor and a former candidate for mayor and city council. He says the rate hike would not only impact residents, but also the city budget that their tax dollars support.
"Those rate increases up to 30 percent will really blow your electric service budget line items out of the water," Cooper told the city council last week.
He asked council members to pass a resolution opposing the rate hike to the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission. Council members didn't approve it immediately, but sent it to the city attorney for review.
Mayor Austin Bonta said he agreed with the spirit of the resolution, but he wanted to make sure there were no unintended impacts. "I don't mean to come off in disagreement at all," Bonta told Cooper. "I'll be there — maybe not literally with you — I don't know if we're going to carpool together. But I'll be there at the public hearing, and I'll be giving my opinion on this, like, as a taxpayer, resident, ratepayer, all that."
Still, council members did approve some fee increases of their own. The new fee schedule for zoning and land use matters is designed to keep up with current engineering costs.
Director of Planning & Community Development Tom Cherry said the changes are long overdue. "We're not a profit center. We just need to break even," Cherry told council members. "The taxpayers shouldn't have to incur the cost of a development trying to come in."
Cherry said these fees vary widely from city to city, but Portage's new fee schedule is mostly in line with Porter County's. He said the biggest impact will be on large-scale developers, not individual homeowners.
"I mean, there are some residential things — you know, if they want to put a fence up," Cherry explained. "Those have not really gone up drastically because we don't need engineering review on that type of thing."
According to the ordinance, the new fees would take effect January 1.
