Gary is putting roughly $1.4 million toward a new homeless shelter at a moment when the availability of a bed could mean the difference between a place to sleep and a criminal charge.
The City Council approved the money for Brothers’ Keeper as a new Indiana law raises the stakes for people sleeping outside. They can now face jail time for sleeping on public land but cannot be charged if no shelter bed is available within 5 miles.
The council assembled the funding by reallocating $256,758 in residual city incentive pay, $400,000 from the Broadway Area CDC fund, and $821,083 originally earmarked for a Lake Street sewer project. The sewer work will still move forward but will now be paid for by the Gary Sanitary District instead of federal American Rescue Plan Act funds.
Senate Enrolled Act 285, which took effect July 1, makes camping, sleeping or taking long-term shelter on public land a Class C misdemeanor punishable by up to 60 days in jail and a $500 fine.
Supporters of SEA 285, including bill author state Sen. Cyndi Carrasco, R-Indianapolis, have said the law is meant to connect people to services rather than punish them. Critics, including sheriffs and homelessness advocates, have argued it will push people into county jails without adequate shelter capacity. Gary’s investment in Brothers’ Keeper doesn’t resolve that tension, but it comes as shelter capacity takes on new legal significance across Indiana.
During Tuesday’s council meeting, trash pickup also took center stage.
For decades, trash pickup for many Gary residents happened where it always has: out back, in the alley. That changed July 1. Now an estimated 30% to 35% of residents are being asked to do something their parents and grandparents never had to: drag their cans to the curb.
The city says it doesn’t have a choice.
“The number one reason why [front-of-house trash pickup] had happened is that our alleys had been neglected for years,” Gary Chief Operating Officer Michael Suggs told the council. “They were just impassable.”
It’s not only a matter of trash trucks losing the fight against overgrowth. Alley deterioration has gotten bad enough that NIPSCO and Indiana American Water can no longer reliably access the infrastructure buried back there, raising the possibility of service disruptions for residents who have nothing to do with how the alleys got that way.
The city says it will consider hardship exceptions. Suggs told the council that city officials would evaluate cases individually where steep inclines or a resident’s physical disability make front-of-house pickup unrealistic. What that process looks like in practice and how many residents will need to use it remain unclear.
Lance Sheppard of Gary, who moved his trash can to the front for the first time this week, said the change isn’t a burden but will take some getting used to.
“I’ve been wheeling the trash to the back alley for 30 years. It’s a routine at this point. The alley seemed to make sense, but we’ll see how this goes,” Sheppard told Capital B Gary.
The trash changes come alongside a broader shift in how Gary handles recycling. A new program launched July 1 moved the recycling collection to a biweekly schedule. Residents are now asked to register and sign an agreement to follow specific sorting rules, limiting recyclables to paper, cardboard, plastics, metals, and glass. The stakes for getting it wrong are also now higher. The materials recovery facility in Homewood, Illinois, will only accept loads with contamination levels below 20%.
The city acknowledges it has been operating with unreliable data. Officials say roughly 5,000 residents are currently tracked as recycling participants, but they don’t trust that number. The new registration process is meant to fix that.
Public Works Executive Director Rachel Caesar put the stakes plainly.
“Recycling only works when it is clean,” she said. “If we can’t successfully recycle, then we’re really not. We’re just kind of operating on a hope that we’re doing something good for the community and for the environment.”
Money wasn’t the only thing moving slowly through the system. Councilman Darren Washington used a “point of information” to ask why zoning ordinances approved by the Board of Zoning Appeals back in April were only reaching the council in July, a three-month gap with no clear explanation. In a separate exchange about administrative communication, he made clear his frustration wasn’t with any single delay.
“If an ordinance originated with the administration, there is somebody here in administration that you can speak to outside of interrupting our public meeting,” he said. “We just want to keep business as we need to keep it with the Gary Common Council so we can flow.”
In other business, the council also approved a $168,500 increase to the Community Development Supplement Fund: $84,500 for the Summer Youth Employment Program, $79,000 for code enforcement vehicle equipment, and $5,000 in miscellaneous interdepartmental expenses.
