THE SHARON McBRIDE FILE

WHO SHE IS

Sharon McBride took her seat on the South Bend Common Council on February 24, 2018, appointed by a Democratic caucus to represent District 3 after Randy Kelly resigned the seat — because he had moved out of the district. She won the seat in her own right in 2019, unopposed, and again in 2023 with 65.6% of the general-election vote. Her colleagues elected her council president in 2022, and she held the gavel through 2024. She sits today as chair of the PARC Committee and vice-chair of Health & Public Safety. Before politics she coached: head girls’ basketball coach at Riley High School for some seventeen years, retired in 2011, with an MBA from Indiana Wesleyan University.

For most of those years she held a second public job at the same time. From 2011 she ran the St. Joseph County Community Corrections DuComb Center — the county’s community-corrections and work-release facility — as its director. That job ended in February 2024, when the county removed her. The council seat did not end. This file is the record of both.

1 · THE SWORN WORDS

On November 10, 2023, Sharon McBride sat for a deposition by Zoom in her own insurance lawsuit (Section 8, below). A court reporter swore her in. The insurance companies’ lawyers asked the questions. A year later the transcript was filed in court — December 2, 2024, as Exhibit A to the defendants’ designation of evidence on summary judgment — which is how her answers became a public record. This is the exchange, transcript page 56:

The September she meant was September 1, 2020. From that day to the day she was deposed is three years and two months — years that cover her 2023 re-election campaign, run in District 3. As of the last sworn word in the record, she was still living there.

Her explanation, in her own words

The same page of the transcript holds her explanation, and this file prints it in full, because it is part of the sworn record and because it is the strongest thing in this file that can be said in her favor — in her favor, in her own voice. Her house, the house at the center of the insurance case, had black mold in it. An allergist had told her it should be remediated, and that she and her dog should not be in the home with it, for medical reasons. Asked whether she had looked for any other accommodations, or had just stayed exclusively with her mother, she answered:

The receipts

The deposition also priced the arrangement, because her insurance claim did. Her own claim documents carried a rental-expense line of $11,200 for September 1, 2020 through January 1, 2022, supported by a signed affidavit of Delores Walker and six pages of handwritten monthly receipts her mother prepared. Asked about them at transcript page 89:

2 · THE MAP

The mother is Delores Walker. The house is 2734 Prast Boulevard, South Bend — her parcel, number 71-08-03-326-001.000-026, Portage Township, assessed at $114,000 in the county’s public parcel records. That is the house in the testimony above: the address she moved to on September 1, 2020, and had not left, by her own sworn account, as of November 10, 2023.

The City of South Bend publishes its own council-district map. Type the address into the City’s own map and the answer comes back in the City’s own colors and the City’s own words: the house sits in Council District 2.

One more fact belongs in this section, because it is part of the same record. The District 3 seat stood empty in 2018 because Randy Kelly had resigned it — he had moved out of District 3. On February 24, 2018, Sharon McBride won the Democratic caucus to succeed him (South Bend Tribune). She holds the seat today because the man before her gave it up over the very question her own deposition would later raise about her: where the District 3 council member actually lives.

3 · THE LAW

The statute that governs her seat is short. Indiana Code 36-4-6-2(d) provides that a Common Council member must reside within the district from which the member was elected. And IC 36-4-6-2(e) provides the consequence, in the statute’s own words:

The legal vehicle for testing title to an office is quo warranto (IC 34-17-1; IC 34-17-2-1(a)) — an action that may be brought by the county prosecuting attorney, or by a private person claiming an interest in the office. It is not, under the statute, the Attorney General’s action to bring; remember that when this file reaches the referral that was never sent (Section 9). The statute asks a question of fact — resident of the district, or not — and only a court can answer it. A court was asked. Once.

4 · THE CASE THAT NEVER GOT HEARD

A dismissal on a 12(B) motion ends a case on the pleadings and procedure. It does not decide the underlying fact, and it does not declare the underlying fact false. The question Collier asked — whether the District 3 councilwoman resides in District 3 — was put to the one institution empowered to answer it, and the institution disposed of the asking without answering. The question remains exactly where her deposition left it: sworn, mapped, and untested.

5 · THE COUNTY JOB

Her official city biography dates her DuComb directorship “2011 until 2023.” The county’s own paper tells the ending more precisely, and this file follows the county’s paper — Resolution R-1-C-2024 of the St. Joseph County Board of Commissioners:

The allegation categories aired publicly in those February days were operational: staffing problems, overtime abuse, financial irregularities — and improper credit card usage (WNDU, February 23, 2024). This file prints them as what they are: allegations aired in public reporting. No document detailing any misuse of a county credit card has ever been produced, and no finding adopting any of these categories has been located.

The county’s investigation was then taken over by the Indiana State Police (Town Crier Wire, March 7, 2025). At the center of the reporting stood a salary — not hers, but her mother’s. That record gets its own section, next (Section 6).

No criminal charge has ever been filed against her out of the DuComb investigation — or out of anything else (Section 8). And she kept the seat.

6 · THE MOTHER

The second public employee in this file is Delores Walker — Sharon McBride’s mother, and the woman whose house is at the center of Sections 1 and 2. She also worked for the county, at the facility her daughter ran. Walker’s county pay record begins in 2013 — two years after her daughter became the DuComb Center’s director — in the Center’s food-service operation, its kitchen. On the county payroll she was carried under the title “Director”: the kitchen director, at a work-release facility directed by her own daughter.

What the county paid her

Her pay, as published from Indiana Gateway payroll data (GovSalaries; OpenGovPay; pulled November 4, 2026):

For a decade the line climbs the way public pay climbs — a few thousand a year. Then, in a single year, it nearly doubles. And in that year, 2023, the kitchen director at the DuComb Center was paid more than the woman who directed the whole facility: Sharon McBride’s own county pay for 2023 was $82,630 (her pay in the same published series: $72,482 in 2017; $82,630 in 2023; $24,041 in the partial year 2024, consistent with a February 23, 2024 termination). The mother out-earned the director by $22,974 — in the director’s own building.

Two things this file does not print about that table, because the record does not carry them. First: how much of the 2023 figure was overtime, as opposed to base pay. A breakdown of that kind circulates in a single local source; no second source publishes it, and the county payroll record that would settle it — pay by pay period, component by component — is among the records demanded on November 4, 2026 (Section 9). Second: who approved Delores Walker’s hire, and who authorized her 2023 pay. Both appear in no record located for this file. Her personnel file — hire date, hiring authority, postings, overtime approvals, separation papers — is demanded in the same November 4 set. What is documented is the shape of it: a mother hired into the facility her daughter directed, a decade of ordinary raises, and then one extraordinary year — the last full year her daughter ran the place.

February 2024, from the mother’s side

When the commissioners moved, the mother’s salary was not a footnote to the case against the director; by the county’s own account it was the trigger. Reporting on the probe records that McBride was removed after officials uncovered her mother’s ~$105,000 salary, and that the salary is what set the firing in motion (Town Crier Wire, March 7, 2025). The sequence on the county’s paper is Section 5’s: questioned February 20, investigation opened February 21, the daughter terminated February 23. The mother’s own county employment ended in 2024 as well — her published pay for that year is $22,581, a partial year. The exact date her employment ended, and in what form — resignation, retirement, or termination — appears in no record located; her separation papers are in the November 4 demands, and until they are produced this file states only what the pay record shows: it ended in 2024.

Her daughter’s answer, on the record

McBride did not stay silent about the county probe, and she did not leave her mother undefended. WSBT-TV (reporter Cicily Porter, February–March 2024) quoted her on the record: the investigators, she said, “had no specific policies and procedures that I violated” — and her mother had earned the money, working overtime because the facility was short-staffed. That is her answer, printed in full where it belongs: if the overtime was real, the authorization paper exists, and it will say who approved it. That paper is demanded (Section 9). Her answer stands in this file unanswered by any document, in either direction, because the documents have never been produced.

What ended, and what replaced it

Both women’s county employment ended in 2024. The daughter’s ending is documented to the day and the word: terminated, effective February 23, 2024, by unanimous resolution of the Board of Commissioners (Exhibit C). The mother’s ending is a pay line that stops partway through the year, with the papers unproduced. The succession is documented too: Julie Lawson, the interim appointed the same day McBride was terminated, was made permanent Director of Community Corrections on August 27, 2024, on the Community Corrections Advisory Board’s recommendation, with the commissioners praising her cost-saving measures and operational improvements (county meeting record). She remains in the post in the county’s January 2026 department appointments. The county’s paper thus closes the loop on the facility: the interim became the fix, and the DuComb Center’s mother and daughter — the director, and the kitchen director who out-earned her — were both gone within the year.

7 · THE VOTE

In February 2026, the South Bend Common Council voted on Bill 01-26 — a bill to eliminate the formal public complaint process against council members. It passed, 6–1. Sharon McBride voted yes (South Bend Tribune).

The process she voted to end was the one process by which a member of the public could lodge a formal complaint against a member of the Common Council — a body that includes, then and now, the councilwoman from District 3. The vote is a matter of public record. What it means is left, as this file leaves its hardest questions, to the reader.

The record, vote by vote

One vote is a moment. A voting record is a pattern, and patterns are what files are for. Below is every vote of Sharon McBride’s that this file could establish from the public record — the significant ones, the contested ones, and the routine ones alike — each with the bill, the date, what it did, the count, her vote, and what the record shows of the opposition. Where her vote comes from a named roll call, the table says so; where it follows from the roster in the minutes, it says that instead. Where her vote could not be established, the item is listed in the coverage note under the table, marked NOT FOUND — the file does not guess at votes.

What this table does not contain, and why. The minutes behind these roll calls were read for the meetings of April 23, 2018; October 10, 2022 (draft minutes); February 6, 2023; October 9 and 23, 2023; October 14, 2024; and July 28 and August 11, 2025, supplemented by established reporting for the rest. South Bend’s signed minutes are approved months — sometimes more than a year — after the meetings they record, and as of November 4, 2026 the signed minutes for October 2026 have not been posted: the final counts on the October 26, 2026 police and fire pay bills (80-26 and 81-26) and the October 26 disposition of Heartwood are therefore NOT FOUND, not undocumented-by-choice. The 2019–2021 minutes were the weakest coverage: the creation of the Community Police Review Board (Ordinance 10721-20, October 5, 2020), its 2021 amendment, and the 2019, 2020, and 2021 budget adoptions are all documented as passed, but no roll calls for them were located, so her votes on them are NOT FOUND. The 2026 and 2027 budget adoptions (October 13, 2025 and October 12, 2026) are documented by date; their counts and her votes are NOT FOUND. Council own-pay votes for years other than 2023 and 2024, and the final counts on the 2026 mayor- and council-pay bills (61-25, 62-25), are NOT FOUND. And two items on a researcher’s list turned out not to be votes at all: the November 9, 2026 Heartwood and NDA-ban items had not yet occurred when this file was built, and the April 2022 consulting contract with Bianca Tirado — $56,640 ultimately paid — was never voted on by the Council at all: under the rule the Tribune cited, professional-services contracts need no council vote, and the paper trail shows the contract signed by McBride as president, with her vice president, in April 2022. No vote exists to record. Her signature is the record.

8 · THE INSURANCE CASE

The deposition at the top of this file exists because Sharon McBride sued her own insurance companies. In McBride v. Citizens Insurance Company of the Midwest and Hanover Insurance Company, St. Joseph Superior Court 7, Cause No. 71D07-2108-CT-000327, she pursued a claim over storm damage to her home and the black mold that followed — the displacement that sent her to her mother’s house. Because the claim sought living expenses, it required her to document where she had actually been living; because she was under oath, that documentation is now the most complete residency record that exists for her, anywhere. The case closed in April 2025, with prejudice.

Her attorney in that case was Peter J. Agostino (court record). The same Peter J. Agostino is the subject of File No. 4 in this series, and serves today as counsel to the South Bend Community School Corporation’s board. The overlap is documented; this file notes it because it is part of the public record, and implies nothing beyond it.

The court record, all of it

9 · WHAT IS STILL OWED

A file like this one is only ever as strong as its missing paper. These are the records that would settle what this page cannot — in both directions. Several of them could help her. All of them are public. None of them has been produced.

Records demanded — November 4, 2026

On November 4, 2026, formal public-records requests under the Indiana Access to Public Records Act (IC 5-14-3) went out for the county and city paper this file has been missing. They are listed here so the demands themselves are part of the record: what was asked, of whom, and when. When the productions land, they will be added to this file at this address, whichever way they cut.

The referral that never moved

One more entry belongs on this ledger, and it is stated plainly because this file states everything plainly: a complete referral package on this matter — cover memo, element checklist, draft citizen letter, and the deposition exhibits — has been assembled since October 16, 2026. It has never been sent. No Attorney General has this file, because no one has ever handed it to one — and under the statute, as Section 3 records, the Attorney General is not the officer who could bring the action in any event; the county prosecuting attorney is. The paper exists. The questions in it are documented. They sit, as of this writing, in a drawer.

THE SILENCE THAT REMAINS

A correction belongs in this file, and this file makes it in the open. An earlier draft of this closing said no on-record public statement by Sharon McBride had been located about any of it. That was wrong as to the county probe: in February and March 2024 she answered the DuComb allegations on the record, to WSBT-TV, and her answer is printed in Section 6, where it belongs.

What remains true is narrower. On two subjects, no on-record word from her has ever been located — not in the research of October 2026, and not in the sweep of November 4, 2026. The first is the residency question: her own sworn deposition, the City’s map, and the lawsuit that tried to test them. The second is the criminal investigations themselves, and how they ended — without charges, and without a word from her. Every other document in this file spoke: the transcript, the map, the statute, the docket, the resolution, the audit. On the two questions that bear on her seat, hers is the one voice missing from her own file.

She remains the District 3 councilwoman. Her term runs through 2027, and the next Common Council election is November 2, 2027; she was on no ballot in 2026. This file is a living file: when the records land — the signed order, the homestead record, the county’s own paper — they will be added here, at this address, whichever way they cut.