Been there before

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

Part 2 of a series about the proposal to merge the police departments of Dundee Township, and ways other villages and police departments have found to work together.

DUNDEE TWP. — It may not yet be possible to find a police cruiser driving down Route 72 whose front door reads “West Dundee Police, Serving East Dundee, Sleepy Hollow and Carpentersville.” But if you dial 911 from any phone in those four villages, or in South Barrington, your call will be answered at and help dispatched from the same place — a roomful of operators in Carpentersville who are paid by an independent organization named QuadCom.

Like a boy and girl who have known each other since they were 5, the cheek-by-cheek villages of Dundee Township have a long history of working together. Most notably, the four set up QuadCom in 1979 to spare themselves the cost of operating four separate dispatch centers 24 hours a day. That room in Carpentersville now handles some 50,000 emergency calls a year, with its costs allocated among the five villages and four fire districts based on their size and the number of calls they generate.

“QuadCom has proven itself over time to be a very cost-effective way of dispatching police and fire calls,” West Dundee Village President Larry Keller said.

In fact, when Sleepy Hollow’s village board recently decided to bow out of the proposal to merge its police force with the Dundees’, and when East Dundee’s board discussed the proposal, several board members and cops said they might have more enthusiasm if a new independent police force was to be set up on the QuadCom model, instead of moving toward an arrangement in which the other villages would pay West Dundee’s department to provide service.

On the other side of Elgin, a similar system called TriCom dispatches police and fire help for St. Charles, Geneva and Batavia.

Outside the police and fire realm, East Dundee and West Dundee also shared the cost of expanding East Dundee’s sewage treatment plant in 1997, with both using it to treat part of their wastewater. And West Dundee has long provided some of Sleepy Hollow’s sewer and water service.

From time to time, people even have asked, “Why are there two different Dundees at all, when towns like Elgin and South Elgin and St. Charles — to say nothing of neighboring Carpentersville — span both sides of the Fox?” When they were founded in the 1830s, East Dundee and West Dundee contained much different kinds of people, with prosperous Scots and Yankees west of the river but working-class German Lutherans east of the river. But since then, the demographies have become much more equal.

Twice, in 1956 and 1962, the idea of merging into one village named Dundee went so far that it was put to voters in referendums. But if demographies had blended, one big thing separated the villages each time: debt owed by one side. One time, Keller notes, East Dundee’s village finances would have benefited more, so West Dundee voters said “no.” The other time, the financial health had been reversed, so this time it was the East Dundee voters who said “no.’

In about 1980, West Dundee President Tom Warner and Sleepy Hollow President Carol Schoengart floated the trial balloon of possibly merging their two villages. The balloon never got off the ground.

In 2006, former East Dundee Village President Roger Ahrens even set up a Web site (www.onedundee.com) to talk about merging the Dundees and solicit online votes for or against it. “But the results were split,” Keller said.

Already sharing cops

When former Buffalo Grove Village Manager William Balling was hired last year by the Dundees to study a police merger there, he knew of two cases in the northwest suburbs where two villages in effect shared the same police force. For at least five years, he says, the village of Deer Park, with about 2,900 people, has paid the neighboring village of Kildeer (population 2,300) to provide police service, for a fixed fee per year. And about a year ago, Grayslake (population 7,500) began providing police coverage to much-smaller neighboring Hainesvile for a fixed fee per year.

The Kildeer patrol cars say “Kildeer Police — Also Serving Deer Park.”

“That’s been an interesting and I think successful partnership,” Balling said. “The combined financial resources have allowed Kildeer to create a larger, solider department than they could have afforded on their own.”

But that partnership also demonstrates a risk that West Dundee would face if it agreed to provide service for a fee to East Dundee and/or Sleepy Hollow.

“Deer Park’s contract with Kildeer is about to expire, and that village is looking at alternatives,” Balling said. If Deer Park decides to set up its own police department or to contract with a different village, Kildeer could suddenly have much less money to support the size force it had built up to cover both towns.

Cars from the county

Perhaps the biggest sharing of police coverage in our area now comes from how several small villages rely on Kane County sheriff’s deputies to answer emergency calls and patrol their towns instead of having their own police departments.

Sheriff Pat Perez said his department does that now for Burlington, Kaneville, Lily Lake, Virgil and Big Rock. Deputies also covered Pingree Grove until it began growing so big it could afford police of its own; and they covered what is now Campton Hills before that area decided to incorporate as a village. And when voters in Valley View — south of South Elgin — decided to disband their village, the sheriff’s office inherited the extra burden of patrolling that development.

In most cases, Perez said, the department simply patrols these little villages’ streets and answers their residents’ calls the same as they would in any unincorporated area. No money is charged for the service, whose costs are covered by county taxes paid by people all over Kane County — most of whom live inside cities and villages that also pay for their own police.

“These are all in the far-western townships and don’t have a large population,” the sheriff said. “Their level of calls isn’t very high, so they’re not really much of a drain on our resources. Of course, if I open the paper and read that Kaneville is putting in a new 250-home subdivision, then we have to talk.”

In one situation, the county does charge. Perez said some of the mini-villages contract to have a sheriff’s car stay exclusively in their town for a certain number of hours on certain days. Kaneville, for example, will have a sheriff’s car run radar four hours at a time to hold down speeding on a street leading to its high school. For these ”detail” arrangements, Perez charges the village $43 per hour.

More coming?

When Balling’s consulting firm began the Dundee-area study last year under the auspices of the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus, the caucus also hired him to study how four other sets of local governments could cut costs or deliver better service by sharing some operations. Here’s how those stand, according to Balling:

In the study most like that of the Dundees, Balling’s firm is looking at whether La Grange, La Grange Park and Western Springs could combine all or some police operations. Balling said he is still collecting data there but that the creation of a joint communications system, perhaps like QuadCom and TriCom, seems to show promise.

In the south suburbs, Balling was asked to figure out whether the fire districts serving Oak Lawn, Alsip and Chicago Ridge could share resources. “That’s still a work in progress,” Balling said. “We looked at the possibility of closing one of the fire stations but decided that would probably not work because of the geography. The issue there is probably to get them into one communications center, and there is the possibility of some joint management, too.”

Another study will look at how the Franklin Park village fire department and the neighboring Leyden Fire Protection District can share facilities. Balling said he has proposed closing one of four fire stations and eliminating some redundant equipment.

In another study still under way, Balling will examine whether Wilmette, Winnetka, Glenview and Northfeld could share a code enforcement department.

In a project not connected with the Mayors Caucus studies, Hinsdale, Clarendon Hills, Burr Ridge and Willowbrook are studying ways to cut costs by sharing police resources. And just by coincidence, he says, the man filling in right now as the interim village administrator in Clarendon Hills is William Balling.