More cops, new fire station needed to handle a Bears stadium in Arlington Heights?

What kind of manpower and resources would Arlington Heights need to handle security and emergency response in and around a new Bears stadium?

Village officials have been contemplating the question ever since the NFL franchise announced its interest in relocating to the Northwest suburb. It led top brass in the fire and police departments in 2022 to shadow municipal counterparts in NFL stadium communities, including Inglewood, California, Foxborough, Massachusetts, Arlington, Texas, and Las Vegas.

But Arlington Heights officials are starting to have more serious planning discussions now that the Bears appear more serious about developing the 326-acre property the team owns on the west side of town.

On Friday, the NFL club announced a long-rumored and much-anticipated shift in stadium development focus back to Arlington Heights after a proposal for a publicly owned Chicago lakefront stadium fell flat with state lawmakers.

Even before then, officials at village hall had been having regular working group discussions about various facets of the potential Arlington Park redevelopment.

Village Manager Randy Recklaus and other officials shed light publicly on some of those internal discussions earlier in the week, during the first in a series of a biennial departmental reports to the new village board.

As it stands, the police and fire departments each have more than 100 sworn personnel to cover a 16-square-mile suburb of nearly 78,000 residents.

For a couple hours on a game day Sunday, the town’s population could double.

But Recklaus said if the stadium is built, it wouldn’t have as dramatic of an impact on the village’s staffing as one might think.

Some 250 police officers are needed to staff an NFL event on average, but those cops would be on overtime and could come from a number of different law enforcement agencies, Recklaus said.

“Those do not all have to come from Arlington Heights. They can be, you know, county sheriffs deputies, Illinois state troopers, folks from around,” Recklaus said. “There’s towns like Foxborough that have the (New England) Patriots and they’re a town half of our size and they manage this through an overtime detail. So you don’t have this massive permanent staffing up. You have kind of a short-term staffing up that’s paid for by the team.”

Arlington Heights would be tasked, however, with the logistic and administrative management of such a personnel operation, Recklaus said.

NFL teams also typically cover the cost of private ambulances for anything that happens inside the stadium, said Recklaus and Fire Chief Lance Harris.

“Everything from the front door out will be Arlington Heights Fire Department’s responsibility,” Harris said. “All the tailgaters, the trips and falls, anything like that.”

At SoFi Stadium near Los Angeles, Harris said he saw vehicles that allowed paramedics to get to people quickly, including ATVs and bicycles with attached medical equipment.

Trustee Jim Bertucci asked: Might Arlington Heights need to buy land close to Arlington Park and build a fire station to serve the sprawling site?

Harris said it would take six minutes for an ambulance to get to the Arlington Downs development of apartments and offices — just southwest of the Bears’ property — from one of the village’s four fire stations, which are all on or near Arlington Heights Road in the center of town.

That’s why — for any cardiac arrest emergency call — ambulances from Rolling Meadows’ fire station on Hicks Road are dispatched, per mutual aid agreement.

“We have to be able to respond out there,” Harris said. “Yes, we can utilize our neighbors some, but eventually they’re going to get tired of us requesting their ambulances all the time.”

Recklaus described the former racetrack parcel as part of a “peninsula” of land relative to the rest of village proper, and acknowledged it has “unique response qualities.”

So it wouldn’t be unheard-of for village officials to request a donation of land for a fire station, considering the size of the redevelopment — and whether it’s a Bears stadium or something else, Recklaus said.

“That’s something that we’ve all been talking about, and if the need arises, we won’t be shy about, because of the unique services that might be needed,” he said.