Which suburbs have more people collecting police pensions than officers on the job?

If all 353 suburban and downstate police departments were combined into one unit, there now would be more people collecting police pensions than sworn officers actually protecting and serving those towns.

That's according to a Daily Herald analysis of police pension data collected by the Illinois Department of Insurance in 2021, the most recent year with complete figures available from the state's more than 350 police pension funds.

State records show there were 12,891 sworn officers employed by suburban and downstate municipal police departments in 2021 compared to 12,927 former officers or surviving spouses receiving pension benefits from those departments. In 2020, there were 617 fewer pensioners than officers.

When combined with Chicago, those figures are nearly double. But Chicago has had more pensioners than active police for several years, records show.

"What that means is more of the overall property tax levy is going to pay for pension obligations and money allocated to the day-to-day operations continues to decrease," said Dorothy Wisniewski, Des Plaines' assistant city manager and finance director. "You have to start looking at how you do more with less, cutting expenditures and possibly raising revenues elsewhere."

Among 80 suburbs in Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake and McHenry counties, Des Plaines had the widest gap between sworn police personnel and the number of pensioners in 2021. Records show the city staffed 95 sworn police positions, while 133 people received pension benefits, a difference of 38 individuals. The gap has only widened in the following years, Wisniewski said.

In 2021, 27 of the 80 suburban police department pension funds reported more pension recipients than officers. A decade prior, that was the case in just four towns, records show.

"Public safety pensions is either the top or near the top of concerns among almost every municipality," said Mark Fowler, executive director of the Northwest Municipal Conference, a lobbying and purchasing cooperative made up 42 suburbs in five counties. "My sense is that the costs keep going up and up, and even as we're waiting for the benefit of (pension) consolidation and Tier 2 (reforms) to kick in, the budgetary pressures escalate."

Pensioners outnumber sworn police personnel in Cook County towns such as Schaumburg, Hoffman Estates, Arlington Heights, Park Ridge, Streamwood, Mount Prospect, Wheeling, Elk Grove Village, Rolling Meadows, Glenview and Northbrook. DuPage County towns such as Elmhurst, Lombard, Downers Grove, Villa Park, Wheaton, Roselle, Oak Brook, Bensenville and Itasca are in the same boat.

Elsewhere in the suburbs, Barrington, Buffalo Grove, Libertyville, Kildeer and East Dundee also have more pensioners than officers, records show.

Then there's Fox River Grove, which is the only town where pensioners not only outnumbered officers in 2021 but the nine beneficiaries also got paid more that year than the eight officers.

"All of it plays into available dollars," Village Administrator Derek Soderholm said. "The more you have to commit to pensions, the less there is to do with funds elsewhere."

Suburban and downstate pensions are funded three ways. First, employees contribute 9.91% of their salaries. Annual investment returns also help cover the ever-growing costs. Then municipalities cover the remainder.

There's no set amount municipalities pay each year, because it fluctuates depending on how well investments did. In recent years, most pension portfolios have performed poorly, requiring larger infusions from municipalities to cover the losses.

The recent investment losses combined with the growing number of police pension recipients is putting pressure on municipal budgets, leaders said.

"From a budgeting standpoint, pensions are the first numbers in our budget and there is no wiggle room," said Jason Bielawski, Roselle's village administrator. "Everything else you can work with, but more and more of our property taxes are being consumed by pensions."

Roselle had seven more pensioners than officers in 2021, state records show.

In Schaumburg, the village paid its 105 officers more than $10.9 million in salaries in 2021. The 138 individuals receiving pension benefits that year from the department were paid nearly $10.5 million. A decade prior, the salary costs were nearly the same with 10 more officers, but pension benefits were nearly half that amount, with just 92 people receiving them.

"That's an interesting thing for sure," said Schaumburg Village Manager Brian Townsend. "There's no question that our pension contributions have increased. We saw a very significant increase last year, 21% higher than the previous year. I think the pain associated with those increases has been muted a little bit by the historic increases in sales taxes, so we haven't had to make any difficult decisions, yet."

In an effort to cut future police pension costs, many departments are putting civilians into some administrative posts once held by sworn officers.

"In our organization we've taken a harder look at that over the years," Bielawski said. "That's because all things being equal, police pensions are the most expensive. Salaries are the same cost, health is the same, so pension cost is the big difference."

It comes as little surprise to anyone that the number of public safety pensioners continues to grow. Police and firefighters can begin collecting their pensions at a much younger age than those in other pension funds and with fewer years of service.

Most retirement-age officers currently have to be only 50 years old and have worked for 30 years to maximize the benefit, which is 75% of their final annual salary. The benefit then grows annually by 3%. Most pensioners make back the entirety of their contributions in less than three years of retirement.

There's also nothing stopping a retired officer from collecting a pension from one department while working at another one, and many do.

In an attempt to boost funding levels of the more than 350 individual pension funds, a law was passed in 2019 consolidating all of them into one fund so that the investment power of the combined pensions would yield more stable and higher-earning results. The funds have been under one umbrella for less than two years, and officials said it's too early to tell what effect consolidation has had on the funds.

Before consolidation, the state created Tier 2 pensions in 2010, making new public employees in all sectors have to work and live longer to collect a pension now with an annual maximum dollar value. The vast majority of Tier 2 employees are not yet eligible for retirement, so the benefit of these reforms also are unknown.

Some of the pension funding issues for towns is self-inflicted. Most public safety pension plans aren't fully funded. The state currently is requiring the pension plans to get to 90% funded by 2040, though legislation has been introduced that moves the goal line for that mandate to 2050. If passed, it would allow towns to reduce the amount of pension spending required each year.

Its future is uncertain, but municipal officials don't seem optimistic.

"There's always some legislation that get introduced, but it never seems to get any traction or go anywhere," Townsend said.