Sam's Club closing means more budget cuts in Rolling Meadows

Rolling Meadows will lose almost $600,000 in sales tax and other fees this year from the closing of the Sam's Club, it was announced at Tuesday's meeting of the city council.

The city staff will bring plans for budget cuts to the council's Jan. 26 meeting, said City Manager Sarah Phillips.

Sam's Club sales tax of $540,000 amounts to almost 10 percent of the city's sales tax revenue, Phillips said after the meeting. Other annual taxes from that business were $50,000 for food and beverage tax and $3,700 for the liquor license. The adjacent Walmart store and the nearby Meijer store each provide more sales tax than Sam's Club, but Phillips said she did not know the exact amounts.

The announcement this week that the store on Algonquin Road will close Jan. 22 was quite a shock to city officials, said Phillips. She said she and Valerie Dehner, community development director, learned there was nothing they could do to pre-empt the closing, then offered any help the city can give for the people losing their jobs.

At the end of September the city reported on its Web site that 150,318 square feet of retail space are available, with the former Dominick's on Kirchhoff Road at 87,000 square feet by far the largest vacancy.

Alderman Brad Judd, fourth ward, said he reluctantly thinks city jobs will have to be cut. The city was already looking at a $1 million funding hole in 2011, he said, and Rolling Meadows will go bankrupt unless there are staff reductions.

Layoffs for 2010 have been the staff of the Police Neighborhood Resource Center and one other position in the police department, Phillips said earlier. However, she said the city is down 34 full-time positions since cuts started during 2008. The city has 167 full-time employees for 2010 and 28 part-time ones, including 13 seasonal employees, said Jim Egeberg, finance director.

On the other hand, Alderman John D'Astice, sixth ward, said the Sam's Club closing could be a chance to get a different kind of store.

"It's an opportunity to fill a big box store that we didn't have before," he said.

When it was pointed out that the village has an empty big box where Dominick's was on Kirchhoff Road, D'Astice said this one is bigger and newer and some of the companies who rejected the downtown location might prefer this one.