In first look, Kane Co. likes DuPage juvenile deal

The population of Kane County’s juvenile justice center could increase nearly 50 percent if a contract to house youths coming from DuPage County’s current facility is signed.

Kane County Board members on the Judicial and Public Safety Committee Monday had their first in-depth look at the deal. The plan, so far, has been much more controversial in DuPage, where county board members voted 11-7 a week ago to proceed with the offer.

Their counterparts in Kane County had few questions Monday in taking a unanimous committee vote to move forward. The full county board has yet to see the contract and must sign off on the deal before any of DuPage’s juveniles come to Kane’s facility.

If DuPage youths do come, Kane officials said it will be business as usual. Kane County already houses juvenile offenders from DeKalb, Kendall and McHenry counties in addition to its local population. Housing juveniles from other counties nets Kane about $400,000 a year, and that income could skyrocket.

The pending contract would see DuPage pay Kane $110 per child per day. DuPage can send Kane a maximum of 24 juveniles to house at any one time. That works out to $2,640 per day, more than $963,000 per year, in new money for Kane County. But Kane officials said they expect to see only about 12 juveniles from DuPage County on an average day. Even receiving half of the maximum number of juveniles from DuPage County would mean Kane’s profits from its juvenile detention center would more than double next year.

Kane County officials indicated the move is pure profit for the county because the juvenile justice center only houses about 49 people on an average day. When the facility first opened about 10 years ago, it housed about 63 juveniles a day. Staffing levels and overhead never shrunk from the days of a larger daily population. That means none of the county’s costs would increase in the deal, said Rick Anselme, superintendent of Kane’s facility.

“Our nursing staff, our kitchen staff, all of it, we are in place right now to be able to handle an increase in population,” Anselme said. “And there is open space to be filled.”

Committee members said they want to see more details about the impact of adding DuPage youths to the insurance liability costs of running the facility. Kane County Board member Jim Mitchell said he wants to see annual cost-of-living escalations built into the fee Kane will charge DuPage in the four-year deal. Board member Phil Lewis asked for more information about what type of education programs are in place for the new inmates compared to what they have in DuPage. The answers to those questions may come before a final vote. But committee Chairman Mark Davoust said he doesn’t see any major roadblocks to final board approval.

“We’re not introducing any new services to what we already do,” Davoust said. “We’re in this business now, and we do it very effectively. This deal just gives us economy of scale.”