Amy Drake sold her tax deferral plan as help for older homeowners and a way to make property taxes “more affordable.” But on the record, Drake acknowledged that Bill 09-26 was not a tax cut at all. It was a deferral. Homeowners 55 and older could postpone between $100 and $500 a year, up to $10,000 total, with the money due later, often after sale or death. The four sponsors of the bill chose not to use an income limit, even though Drake said state law allowed them to set one. “We are only using age,” she said.
A bill sold as affordability policy should at least test for affordability. This one did not. A homeowner in real financial distress and a homeowner with substantial assets were treated the same, so long as they met the age threshold. That is not targeted relief. It is an age-based debt program presented as compassion.
Then there is the amount. The maximum annual benefit was $500. That is $41.67 a month. For all the moral language surrounding the proposal, the county was being asked to create, and pay for, a new administrative program to offer at most the equivalent of a small monthly utility bill. If a homeowner’s finances are truly so fragile that $41.67 a month stands between stability and losing their home, then the honest answer is direct, targeted help. It is not a government-run delay in payment that leaves the full tax bill intact.
And if affordability were truly the priority, the public has every right to ask why that principle did not govern the county’s own spending. Since Drake took office on January 1st, 2023, the county’s all-funds adopted budget has risen from $191,436,942 in 2022 to $248,200,414 in 2026, an increase of $56,763,472, or about 29.7 percent.
That is the contradiction at the center of this debate. Drake became a part of a county government that became substantially more expensive, then asked for applause for a plan that does not reduce taxes at all, but merely defers them for a narrow slice of older homeowners. If affordability had really mattered, the county budget would not have increased by 30% over 4 years, and taxpayers across St. Joseph County would be paying less in county taxes today. Real affordability means restraining spending so everyone feels less pressure. It does not mean expanding government and then offering a symbolic tax deferral worth $41.67 a month to a limited group of seniors.
Councilwoman Diana Hess was blunt about what the measure really was. “This is essentially a loan against your property taxes,” she said, because the homeowner is building up a balance that ultimately has to be paid back by someone. She said the measure seemed like “less benefit than it is cost,” and later suggested that since the county already accepts small partial payments on tax bills, broader public awareness of that existing option “might be a better solution than to go this route.”
Councilman Mark Catanzarite raised the basic competence question. County employees with deep institutional knowledge, he noted, were still surfacing “legitimate real questions” about the plan. He pressed for cost estimates and asked whether anyone had done a dry run through the offices to see how long an application would take to process. Auditor John Murphy guessed software alone could cost around $25,000 on the low end. Drake’s answer was essentially that the county would use the extra time before implementation to figure it out later.
Council President Bryan Tanner made the deeper argument. Calling the plan “more affordable,” he said, “rings hollow” when the real message is: “don’t worry about these taxes now, you can worry about them in the future.” He warned against “a sense of false affordability for what is effectively debt.” And he noted the practical absurdity of the county’s position: staff were still “struggling to figure out the exact I’s that need to be dotted and T’s that need to be crossed,” yet older residents in financial distress would be expected to understand “what their short-term or long-term obligations are.”
During the public hearing on the bill, Steve Weldy, a local Realtor, said the plan would let homeowners “forgo some of their home equity and go into debt” to defer taxes. “This is a debt,” he said. “This is like a payday loan to pay your taxes.” If the county wanted to give people a break, he said, it should “actually lower their taxes.”
The hearing exposed the practical weakness of the proposal. The deferred portion was only part of the bill. The remaining taxes would still be due on the normal schedule, and council members were still openly confused about what would happen if a participant fell behind on that non-deferred balance. At one point, the discussion turned to whether a rule violation could forfeit the deferment and make the deferred taxes due anyway. That is the heart of whether the program actually protects anyone.
“We don’t expect many people to file for this,” Drake said.
“These are people that are probably at the end of their life.”
That line defined the bill more clearly than any slogan ever could. This was not a serious countywide answer to property-tax pressure. It was a niche program for a small number of people, with a small benefit, sold in the language of urgency and compassion. Drake wanted the moral credit for helping seniors while asking the public to ignore the bill’s small scale, the lack of income limits, the unanswered questions from county staff and the much larger spending decisions that have added to taxpayer pressure for everyone else.
The bill passed 5 to 4. It was not a consensus measure. It passed on party lines, over sustained objections about cost, complexity, debt and whether the policy would meaningfully help the people it was supposed to serve.
The county should help residents in genuine distress. But that means targeting need, choosing relief over delay and restraining spending so taxpayers broadly face less pressure. Amy Drake did not pass a serious affordability measure. She passed a small tax-delay program, without an income limit, without firm implementation costs, over repeated warnings from council members and outside professionals who saw Bill 09-26’s weaknesses clearly.
It was a bad bill.
Logan Foster
Logan Foster founded Redress South Bend and reports on local government and public records in South Bend and St. Joseph County. He is 31 years old and is majoring in finance. He is a Cleveland sports fan and a longtime season ticket holder of the Cleveland Cavaliers.
