Kane County decides GPS for stalkers may be good thing after all
Kane County is two months out of compliance with a new state law requiring courts to provide enhanced GPS monitoring devices to keep tabs on dangerous stalkers, but decided Monday that funding the project may actually have a positive effect on the budget.
The new law is designed to offer more protection to the potential victims of violent individuals with a pattern of violating orders of protection. It came on the books Jan. 1 after last year's murder of an Arlington Heights woman, Cindy Bischoff, by her former boyfriend after he repeatedly violated the protective orders she won against him.
Kane and many counties have been slow to implement the new law as it came without funding from the state.
"This is an unfunded mandate from the deep thinkers in Springfield," said Kane County Board Finance Committee Member Bill Wyatt. "They love to pass laws down there without any thought as to what the impact is on us."
That pretty much summed up several months of eye-rolling over the issue in various county committees as staff determined it would take at least $100,000 to fund the GPS monitoring for the remainder of the year. Initial estimates placed the cost as high as $360,000 a year. The burden comes after Kane County closed its books on 2008 in the red.
Eyes stopped rolling Monday when staff and Kane County Chief Judge F. Keith Brown told the finance committee the devices may actually save and make money for the county.
The law requires someone to monitor the GPS signal of every person being monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When the person being monitored enters a zone too close to the person who has the protective order in place, a call goes out to the potential victim and the person being monitored to try and correct the situation.
Brown told the committee it is possible to charge the monitoring cost of the system to the people being monitored. That could help the service pay for itself. However, Brown said a number of the people in this situation tend to be unemployed or without the financial means to pay for the device. On the other hand, people being monitored by active GPS won't be clogging up the Kane County jail, saving all the daily costs associated with an inmate's stay. That will help the county with one of its main budget goals - cutting the jail population and the costs of housing inmates outside the county when the jail is full.
The finance committee agreed to the $100,000 of funding with close monitoring of where the actual costs end up. If approved by the full county board, the system could be up and running by April.