Porter County voters resoundingly want a new Auditor.

In the primary election on Tuesday, Democrat and Chesterton Tribune reporter Vicki Urbanik crushed incumbent James Kopp by a two to one margin.

Urbanik garnered 4,643 votes or 67 percent to Kopp’s 2,294 or 33 percent.

Running unopposed on the Republican ticket, Robert J. “Bob” Wichlinski had 5,841 votes.

Kopp’s defeat was on the other side of a rout. He won, for example, one of his two home precincts in Ogden Dunes, Portage 34, by only a single vote—35 to Urbanik’s 34—but lost the other, Portage 4, by a more substantial margin, 34 to Urbanik’s 50.

The only other high-profile incumbent in Porter County to lose Tuesday was Porter Council Member Rita Stevenson, D-2nd, who was similarly crushed and by exactly the same margin. In that race challenger Jeremy Rivas garnered 1,791 votes or 67 percent to Stevenson’s 869 or 33 percent. Stevenson was apparently targeted by supporters of the Northwest Indiana Regional Development Authority for her anti-RDA vote.

Kopp, on the other hand, appears to have run afoul of the property-tax morass which has plagued his administration: excessively late and sometimes miscalculated property-tax bills and errors in the tax rates themselves and in the certified assessed values.

“I think there’s been a lot of anger about our property-tax situation,” Urbanik told the Tribune late Tuesday night. “We’re already seeing on the Republican side that Republican candidates are saying that we’ve to got to ‘fix’ county government. Well, the main thing that’s been wrong in county government has been our property-tax administration and the Auditor plays a key role in that.”

Urbanik did note that delays in the issuance of property-tax bills are probably, going forward, just a bad memory at this point. “Timeliness is definitely an issue,” she said, “but I don’t believe we’re going to see late tax bills again, because the new bill that was passed just this year says basically that if a county is very late with its property-tax bills, it must issue provisional bills. . . . So I don’t think we’re going to see late property-tax bills again.”

Urbanik hastened to add that the Assessor’s Office has had delays of its own. “But I think it’s fair to say and I think most everyone would agree that those delays have been caused by the major changes that we’ve seen in the state with the assessment process, namely, the trending process,” she said. “Regardless of who wins the Assessor’s race in the fall, I do pledge to work with them, whether it’s a fellow Democrat or a Republican.”

Urbanik did congratulate Kopp on waging a clean campaign. “We both ran an above-board campaign,” she said. “We didn’t go personal and we didn’t go negative. To me that was really important, that my campaign stayed positive and we didn’t get overly critical.

“I did raise the concerns that I felt needed to be raised, namely, that we need to re-focus on accuracy and thoroughness, because there’ve been too many errors that have caused taxpayers a lot of unnecessary cost. But I pretty much limited my criticisms to that and (Kopp) talked a lot about his experience and the things that he did in the office during his three and a half years. And we never threw the mud at each other and I do want to thank him for that.”

Posted 5/5/2010