Proposal would blend three police forces

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

DUNDEE TOWNSHIP — The village boards of East Dundee, West Dundee and Sleepy Hollow are considering a proposal to combine their police departments under a West Dundee police chief’s command in an effort to save tax money.

Consultant William R. Balling presented the plan Thursday night to a joint meeting of the three village boards as 35 other people — some of them police officers whose jobs could be eliminated under the proposal — listened in at the Dundee Township Senior Center.

The boards commissioned Balling’s firm to do the study last spring, splitting the $22,500 cost with a grant from the MacArthur Foundation. It is one of five such studies Balling is doing under the auspices of the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus, each analyzing whether groups of suburban villages and fire districts can save money by combining their fire, police and/or code enforcing operations. Balling, a former Buffalo Grove village manager, was assisted in the study by former Carpentersville manager Craig Anderson.

After asking questions, members of the three boards agreed to discuss the idea in their own meetings beginning next week and to meet together again in four to six weeks.

Spending cuts

Balling estimates the three villages could cut their annual policing costs from a total of $5.96 million a year now to $4.69 million by combining operations and reducing their total size while using increased efficiency to continue providing a similar level of protection.

At first, the operation would be run by a West Dundee chief and lieutenant, using the West Dundee police station along Route 31 as the main base. Some layoffs likely would be involved as the number of chiefs and lieutenants was reduced from five to two, the number of sergeants from 10 to seven or eight, the number of full-time patrol officers from 24 to 18 or 19, and the number of police cars from 33 to 20.

Because officers currently in the three forces have different salary levels and benefits packages, Balling recommends that East Dundee and Sleepy Hollow continue paying their remaining employees even as they serve under the West Dundee leadership. However, as these people retire or take other jobs, the organization would change gradually over 10 years or so until it is an entirely West Dundee police force, with the other villages paying West Dundee to provide service.

Balling said he recommended that West Dundee become the lead department because that village has the largest population, largest police force and most spacious, up-to-date police station. However, he proposes that East Dundee’s aging police station be kept as a “report-writing station” and that Sleepy Hollow’s small but modernized police station be kept as “an unmanned response station,” unless village officials want that space for other uses.

Savings outlined

The hardest village to sell on the plan may be Sleepy Hollow. While all three villages are projected to save money, Sleepy Hollow would save just $134,800 compared with $456,500 saved by West Dundee and $655,900 by East Dundee. Balling said that is because Sleepy Hollow’s police operation — with no commercial areas to patrol, lower pay and more part-timers — already is by far the cheapest of the three villages’, making it harder to squeeze out even more savings. In terms of population, in the current budget year, Sleepy Hollow spends only $235 per person on police, compared with $400 per person in East Dundee and $633 in West Dundee.

“The total Sleepy Hollow benefit is just a dime a day per capita,” Sleepy Hollow Trustee Scott Finney said. “That’s a long way to go for a dime.”

But “we have to hear what our constituents say, too,” Sleepy Hollow Village President Steve Pickett said.

West Dundee Village President Larry Keller noted that “not everything can be wrapped up in dollars and cents — especially when it comes to personnel. We don’t want to lose anybody.”

“It may be ultimately that the disparity between these three communities is so large that we can’t bridge it,” Balling said.

But if the village boards all do want to participate, he said, it could be possible, with an “aggressive” schedule, to work out the details and begin the police-force integration before the end of 2012.