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The 2026 budget for the Kosciusko Coalition on Drug Education (KCODE) will have to be presented again to the Kosciusko County Council in December after it failed to get the council’s approval Thursday night after they had questions about money spent on lunches.
Kosciusko County Prosecuting Attorney Brad Voelz and KCODE Coordinator Heidi Blake presented the $88,000 budget to the council.
Explaining what KCODE is, Voelz said, “It’s a collaboration of professionals from all walks of life in our community, including schools, healthcare, law enforcement, rehabilitation and recovery, judicial, probation, prosecutor, reentry court, JCAP, KCRP, community corrections and others.”
He said they meet for lunch once a month to share ideas and methods on how they all can better cooperate to address substance abuse issues in the community. They frequently have more than 30 people at their meetings.
“Our KCODE is so good, in fact, that a representative of the Indiana Criminal Justice Institute (ICJI) recently attended our meeting to learn the secret of our success, and we’re being held out as a model for other communities to follow,” Voelz said.
Another part of KCODE’s mission is to distribute grant money, mostly funded by the ICJI, to organizations involved in recovery from addiction, law enforcement or drug laws. To be eligible to receive grant money, an organization that applies must be a year-round active participant. On receiving applications, KCODE has a separate committee, which decides how to distribute the limited funds. That money passes through the prosecutor’s budget, so Voelz was at the council’s meeting to ask for their approval and oversight of the 2025 distribution for 2026.
According to a copy of the 2025 awards, there are four grant categories - prevention & education, intervention & treatment, law enforcement & justice and KCODE operations. In each category, about $22,000 is budgeted. Organizations budgeted to receive funds vary from $10,000 for Kosciusko County Teen Court, $4,000 for the Kosciusko Jail Chemical Addiction Program, $7,650 for the Kosciusko County Reentry Court and $12,000 for the coordinator annual fees. A total of 15 organizations are slated to receive funding.
Blake explained all 92 Indiana counties are mandated by state statute to have a local coordinating council, with KCODE being’s Kosciusko’s. KCODE has been around for over 30 years.
“Kosciusko County is going to be featured in a report representing northeast Indiana for the entire state because of our work with our local coordinating council, and it’s really exciting at every meeting to be able to see the collaboration and sharing and hearing about everything that is happening, plus hearing about some of the gaps and ways that we can provide more services in our community,” she said.
Council President Tony Ciriello, who said he’s familiar with KCODE because he used to be a part of it for a long time, said, “It was brought to my attention recently, so I’m just going to ask the question, when you guys have your meetings, does KCODE pay for the lunches for all of the attendees? And what kind of money are we talking about with that?”
Blake said it depends on how many attendees are coming. “So it’s anywhere, I would say, between $800 to $1,100, and I have cleared that with the Indiana Criminal Justice Institute to make sure that’s an allowable expense in our budget, and that part comes out of the coordinator fund.”
Ciriello and Councilwoman Kimberly Cates asked if that $800-$1,100 was per year or per month. Blake said the cost depended on how many people came to the meeting and it was per month. Ciriello said when he was a part of KCODE, everyone either brought their own lunch or didn’t eat.
Blake said when she first started attending KCODE over 10 years ago, there was only five to 10 people who attended the meetings. Now, they have anywhere from 20 to 35 people attend. She reiterated that the ICJI assured her the lunches were an allowable expense.
Cates said she understood that, but if the budget is $88,000, Blake was spending more than 10% of that on food. Blake noted she does not receive the salary that prior KCODE coordinators did, and the money for the lunches comes out of the coordinator fund.
Councilman DeLynn Geiger made a motion to approve the budget, but no one seconded his motion so the motion died. Ciriello suggested more information be provided to the council and they will review the budget again at their December meeting.
Justice Building
County Administrator Marsha McSherry requested approval from the council for an additional appropriation for $172,000 out of the county’s rainy day fund for engineering consulting from Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates out of Indianapolis for the soffit failure at the Justice Building. The county commissioners approved the amount at their last meeting.
On Aug. 29, exterior limestone panels on the east side (facing Lake Street) of the Justice Building fell. No one was injured.
Of the $172,000, McSherry said $69,000 is directly attributed to the failure, with the remainder of the funds for the reviewing of rest of the north part of the building.
“We are still working with the insurance company on the $69,000, but we haven’t worked clear through that to know if that’s going to be possible or not,” she said.
Councilwoman Kimberly Cates asked, “Is this the engineering of it or the total fixing of it?”
McSherry replied, “This just gets us to the fixing part. This is the exploratory part to open it up and see where we’re at with the rest of the building. The $69,000 is fixing the soffit failure because we know what has to be done there because the engineers have reviewed it, and the forensic engineers have reviewed it, and this is where we’re at. So once we get through this part of it, then we will actually get quotes to do the work.”
Council President Tony Ciriello said the funds will come out of the rainy day fund, “which is money we haven’t touched in five years probably. So it’s sitting for emergency purposes like this.”
There’s currently about $3.4 million in the county’s rainy day fund.
Councilman Dave Wolkins asked McSherry if she knew if the county’s insurance was going to pay any of the costs or not. McSherry said they’ve already paid $16,000 for the initial engineering assessment that was done, but she doesn’t know yet if the insurance will pay any of the $69,000. There also aren’t any engineering estimates at this time, she told him.
The additional appropriation was unanimously approved.
McSherry then asked for a transfer of $30,000 from cumulative capital development land and improvements to legal services.
“We will run out of money in that line item due to a lot of economic development matters that have had to see legal consulting. That included contract review, the data center, Slate and a few other items that had to have extra work done that we don’t normally have in a year’s time,” she explained.
The money is there to transfer, she stated. The council approved the transfer.
