The St. Joseph County Council meets next Tuesday, Jan. 6 to elect their officers for next year. The nine-member council’s four minority party Democrats expect to continue their coalition with Republican President Dan Schaetzle.
Their bipartisan power-sharing agreement announced in January was something new for the county. The Democrat taking the council’s number two position, president pro tem Bryan Tanner, says he thinks it went well.
“I think it was really successful," Tanner says. "It didn’t come without its challenges from time to time and some natural differences of opinion, given our backgrounds and constituencies that we serve. Certainly there were a handful of votes that were not uniform across the coalition.”
Tanner says one of their biggest accomplishments was deciding to have the county absorb health insurance cost increases for county employees, in a year when the county couldn’t afford pay raises because of state-mandated property tax cuts. He said they were especially sorry they couldn’t give county police a pay raise but they did create a new policy on how to spend cash reserves, earmarking $16 million, about a third of the county’s $48 million in reserves, to fully fund officer retirement pensions.
”It’s a fortunate position to be in after several years of fiscal restraint.”
He says the council also tapped the reserve for $1.9 million for road repairs, roughly doubling what the county typically spends on that in a year.
”That’s a big thing that we were able to accomplish in 2025 that I expect that we’ll want to do again in 2026, of some variety of that amount, because again another state policy, the Community Crossings grant that the county has consistently received over the last decade, that grant was not awarded going into 2026.”
