Lake residents now enjoy one of the most frugal county governments in the state, according to a new study released Monday by the Board of Lake County Commissioners.
County Commissioner Gerry Scheub, D-Crown Point, said county officials should be congratulated for having cut spending by $46 per person over the last five years.
That is the conclusion of a recent study of county government spending by Larry Blanchard, an administrative aide to the Board of Lake County Commissioners. Blanchard served 15 years as a member of the Lake County Council, which oversees budgets.
Blanchard said the county government's tax footprint is now the 15th lowest in the state, spending only $213.50 in public funds per resident. That is lower than LaPorte County, which spends $359 per person and Porter County, which spends $228.84 per person. The median amount counties spend in Indiana per person is $264.79.
County officials will be sending a copy of the study to all members of the General Assembly and the governor's office in a lobbying effort to relax punitive measures by state officials who complain local government spending in Lake is too high.
County government spending has always been a small fraction of the tax burden Lake property owners bear. Municipal government and other taxing units receive the lion's share of local tax dollars.
Lake County government was spending more than $259 per person in 2007. Officials were forced to reduce their budgets by tens of millions of dollars since 2007 and have refused to adopt a local option income tax.
Those budget reductions were forced on them by a state law freezing Lake's overall property tax levy, tax caps that reduce the amount of taxes that can be extracted from any single property, and plummeting property assessments in the wake of the recent economic downturn and housing crash.
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