Suburban court weekend hours could be on the line

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Sheriff Tom Dart clashed anew over budget cuts Wednesday, with the possibility raised that deep cost reductions could lead to closing suburban courthouses on weekends.

That would mean defendants arrested after suburban courts closed on Friday afternoons would have to be held in jail over the weekend or transported to the main Cook County criminal-courts building at 26th and California in Chicago for arraignment, according to a previous proposal by Dart.

Preckwinkle is calling for 21 percent across-the-board cuts and says she’ll make the cuts if department heads don’t. Dart said he had submitted cuts of 9 percent, $43 million of his $440 million budget.

“There are functions we have to do. We have to run a jail. We have to run a police department. We have to have someone screen the people coming in to courthouses,” Dart said. “Are we reaching a breaking point where we’re not going to be able to do any more? Absolutely.”

That raised the specter of weekend courthouse closings, which Dart has proposed before. He called it “horribly inefficient and wrong” to have Saturday bond courts in Skokie and Rolling Meadows, for instance.

Dart spokesman Steve Patterson said he couldn’t set a dollar amount for savings from closing suburban courts — including Bridgeview, Maywood and Markham, as well — on weekends and after 6 p.m.

“But obviously you’d have no judicial staff, court-clerk staff, public defenders and state’s attorneys working then,” Patterson added, “so you’d have huge savings.”

Preckwinkle said any decision on court hours and other such operations belongs to Chief Judge Timothy Evans.

Evans did not return a call for comment, but the issue figures to come up during departmental budget hearings before the County Board, which begin Monday.

Preckwinkle dismissed Dart’s argument that deeper cuts would push the county past the point where it could provide essential services like law enforcement.

To meet a projected $487 million shortfall in the county’s $3 billion budget, Preckwinkle has asked for 16 percent cuts year to year, but that jumps to 21 percent with the shortened 2011 fiscal year the county will face by the time the budget is approved in late February.

Dart said he had already reduced his department’s budget by 10 percent since he took office. “I’m down over 200 people,” he said. “We have been in the trenches and at the forefront making cuts in county government, and we challenge any other office to do what we’ve done over the last four years.”

According to Patterson, the sheriff’s department originally submitted more than $48 million in new cuts by eliminating positions and overtime, but had to add back in $4 million for new correctional officers required in court settlements concerning the county jail.

Dart blamed the president’s office for any disconnect. “There has not been a very good communication line between them and us,” he said.

For all that, both Dart and Preckwinkle said they were pursuing common ground with a deadline looming to present a preliminary budget to the County Board Feb. 1.

“Is there more we’re willing to work on? Yeah, we’ve said that from the beginning,” Dart said.