No contract policing for Pingree Grove, sheriff says
A finance task force proposal to cut the police department in Pingree Grove and contract Kane County for policing services was dead on arrival.
Kane County Sheriff Pat Perez said he will not consider that, citing his department’s staffing levels. “I’m down 10 deputies from where I was two years ago,” he said of his current 85 deputies. “I’m in no position to provide policing services to anyone else.”
The proposal was among 34 cost-saving ideas put forth by the task force, which examined the village budget to try come up with $50,000 in cuts for next fiscal year.
The full list will be presented to the village board on Monday, and the board ultimately will decide which measures, if any, to enact. The list will be made public on Friday, Village Administrator Ken Lopez said.
Perez also questioned the math done by task force members when they calculated the potential savings from eliminating the village’s police department.
The current police department budget is almost $734,000 and includes 12 part-time officers and four full-timers, including Chief Carol Lussky.
According to the task force’s report, “for approximately $220,000 per year, Pingree Grove could continue to have round-the-clock police coverage.”
In comments on the Facebook page for the Pingree Grove Accountability Network, a residents’ group, savings estimates amount to up to $600,000.
“They were throwing around numbers they had never discussed with me,” Perez said.
Contracting police services probably would cost about $110,000 per full-time officer, and the village would need at least nine officers to cover weekends, vacations, sick time, potential injuries and more, Perez said. “In staffing levels you have to build in the relief factor,” he said.
Task force chairman Rich Eckert said he wasn’t sure where the task force’s estimate came from.
“Various team members did their own research and submitted it to the committee,” Eckert said. “I don’t know if the calculations are 100-percent accurate. That would be for the board to review.”
Task force member Darrel Featherly said that on Tuesday he emailed Pat Gengler, public information officer for the Kane County Sheriff’s Office, with questions about contracting policing services, but didn’t discuss any figures. “I thought it would be OK to ask a couple of simple questions,” he said. “I overstepped my boundaries.”
On Wednesday, Perez sent an email to Village President Greg Marston in which he criticized Featherly’s move, as well as the estimates of $300,000 to $400,000 in savings, as reported by a Daily Herald article. The email was made public with Perez’s consent at a task force meeting that night.
“Discussions of this magnitude need to be initiated by you, Chief Lussky and me, not by those under us pushing their own agendas,” Perez wrote.