Dart looks at cutting anti-graffiti program to save money
By Lisa Donovan Cook County Reporter February 7, 2011 8:42PM
Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM
With a mandate to cut his budget, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said the writing was on the wall.
His graffiti unit, which for years has not only kept suburban communities tidy but also tracked certain criminals, will be erased.
“The graffiti unit will be a problem because there’s a lot of suburbs that depend on us doing that function. We do a lot of it, it helps us with the identifying the movement of gangs,” Dart told Cook County Commissioners on Monday as he laid out how he’ll meet a countywide call for budget cuts.
In order to trim $53 million in spending, Dart says he expects about 100 layoffs — including eight staffers from the graffiti unit — and the $9 million-a-year responsibility of janitorial duties at county government buildings will be moved to the county’s facilities management office.
The cuts, he said, will still allow him to continue the central duties of patrolling unincorporated stretches of the county as well as guarding the jail and criminal and civil courts.
Since her November election, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle said 16 percent cuts across countywide are necessary to plug a $487 million deficit this year.
After she and Dart publicly sparred over budget cuts — including the sheriff calling for Preckwinkle to cut his budget entirely and he mocked that he could patrol the county and protect the jail on his bicycle — the two reached an agreement that he would cut his spending by 12 percent.
Republican Cook County Commissioner Peter N. Silvestri, who is also the Mayor of Elmwood Park, said during Monday’s county board finance committee he’s not ready to see the graffiti unit go away.
“Sheriff Dart, you’re going to really break the hearts of all the suburban mayors with that graffiti unit,” Silvestri said.”It’s just easier for one central agency to do it.”
“I know,” Dart said.
“I would like to explore with you and perhaps with the municipalities on how maybe the municipalities could help fund it,” Silvestri said. “It would be impossible for 120 municipalities to do the job that your men and women do in that regard.”
Dart expressed a willingness to figure out how to keep the program going.
He also suggested some budget cuts down the line to trim costs, including shutting down weekend suburban bond court — something that would need to be approved by the Cook County Circuit Court’s Chief Judge Tim Evans.
“More often that not there are twice as many employees as defendants,” Dart said.
He believes that weekend bond court can be handled in a single location, at 26th and California in Chicago. Suburban police departments have raised concerns that this could be too costly for them to carry out.
He also suggests that “non-controversial” hearings could be conducted by webcast, or even through closed-circuit television to reduce the costs of shuttling prisoners between jail and, particularly, the suburban courthouses.
“The set-up is pretty much all there,” Dart said. “We’re not talking huge investments of capital.”
Evans, who testified about his own county budget later in the day, said he’s not so sure the legal community should order someone accused of a crime to settle for attending court via closed-circuit television.
“They [the accused] want to be there, they want to confront the witness [testifying] against them,” Evans said at a budget hearing later in the day.
“That’s a pretty tough pill to swallow.”
Hearings continue through the month as commissioners work toward a Feb. 28th deadline to approve a $3.1 billion spending plan for the year.
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