Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Ev Charging topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
La Porte sustainability commission outlines steps toward EV chargers and battery storage
Summary
The La Porte Sustainability Commission discussed possible locations, funding and long-term maintenance for electric vehicle chargers and explored battery storage as a resilience option; staff will pursue vendor contacts and regional grant partners and invite utility and planning staff to future meetings.
The La Porte Sustainability Commission spent a substantial portion of its meeting discussing plans to expand electric vehicle (EV) charging and to explore battery storage options to boost local resiliency.
An unidentified staff member told commissioners the city has a window of federal and tax-credit incentives that make battery storage worth studying, noting, “battery storage and some other units … are still able to get a 30% rebate.” The staffer described a recent example of a 6-megawatt, containerized battery installation as a realistic model for municipal use.
Commissioners and staff identified several candidate sites for chargers, including the downtown area near the ice-skating rink and restaurant cluster, the commuter lot near the Indiana Toll Road, the YMCA, the library and Kesseling Park. Staff noted that some sites already have partial infrastructure: “The library, if I remember correctly, installed some … infrastructure to take a charger, but they did not get a charger,” and that the ChargePoint stations the city obtained about a decade ago were grant-funded through a regional program.
Funding and long-term maintenance were recurring concerns. A staff speaker advised the commission to decide whether chargers would be municipal assets to own and maintain or whether the city would partner with private operators, pointing out that the commission did not have a dedicated maintenance line in the current budget and that past ChargePoint equipment came through a NERPC grant.
Members discussed a policy idea to require large development projects to include charging infrastructure. As one participant put it, the city could adopt a rule that ties required charging infrastructure to the scale of development — for example, a set number of chargers per units or per parking-area size — so new construction installs wiring or stalls during site development rather than retrofitting later.
Next steps the commission identified include pursuing vendor contacts (staff reported having submitted a request to Tesla), inviting Tim Warner (water utilities) and David Heinold (city planner) to upcoming meetings for technical briefings, and reconnecting with regional grant administrators such as NERPC to explore funding. No formal motions on charger procurement or storage projects were taken at this meeting.
