Des Plaines 911 center considers move

Officials with the North Suburban Emergency Communications Center are considering vacating the second floor of Des Plaines City Hall and moving the 911 operation to another site.

At present, it's unclear where the 911 center would be relocated. It could operate out of an existing building in one of its member communities — Des Plaines, Park Ridge, Niles and Morton Grove — or move into an entirely new facility built with grant money and funding from the cities/villages it serves, Executive Director Sherrill Ornberg said.

Ornberg said discussions about moving out of Des Plaines City Hall have been ongoing for some time, partly because the city's police department located next door is crunched for space and could use the extra room and also to accommodate the center's own need to expand.

“If another jurisdiction was interested in joining us, we don't even have a closet to put them in,” Ornberg said. “We take up a little more than half of the second floor, and we're pretty much crammed. Des Plaines is interested in using our portion of the second floor to alleviate the extremely congested Des Plaines police department.”

For years, Des Plaines city officials have talked about expanding the 20,000-square-foot police station at Miner Street near Graceland Avenue or building a larger police headquarters elsewhere. Yet, plans to purchase land for a new building were never executed due to budget concerns.

While Des Plaines provides space for the 911 center, the center pays the city for financial services and payroll help. Presently, each member municipality, based on its call load, is responsible for a portion of the overall $5.8 million budget to operate the center, Ornberg said.

The 911 center is governed by the Joint Emergency Telephone System (JETS) Board, whose members include the four city/village managers, four police chiefs and two fire chiefs of the respective partner communities.

The center has been in operation for 20 years and handles emergency police and fire calls for Des Plaines and Park Ridge, and police calls for Niles and Morton Grove. Its 47 employees include 30 dispatchers, four managers, six supervisors, two information technology staff members and an administrative assistant.

The Des Plaines center is manned 24 hours a day by 10 emergency communications personnel at any given time. The center will be adding seven dispatchers at a satellite location in Niles, which is not yet functional, Ornberg said.

Ornberg said the JETS board is yet to pick a new location for the center. Though officials have a couple of possible sites in mind, she was hesitant to divulge their locations for security reasons.

“After 9/11, we would prefer to just be invisible,” she said.

Ornberg said officials don't have an estimate for how much it would cost to build a new center. They hope to apply for a federal grant to help with construction, and the remainder of the cost would have to be shared by the four member municipalities.

All four communities have to sign off on any such move, which is not likely to happen anytime soon. Even if the money to build a new facility was in hand today, it could take up to two years to construct and equip the center, Ornberg said.

The matter will likely come up for discussion at future city council/village board meetings.