Preckwinkle lays out ambitious agenda

New Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle vowed Tuesday to limit overtime spending, study pension reform for county employees and push new fees for unincorporated suburban areas.

Preckwinkle, on her first full day in office, released an ambitious 27-page plan for her first 100 days in office and beyond.

Chief among her goals is to engage in pending labor negotiations and cut labor costs, both overall and in the Health & Hospitals System, to review and limit overtime spending and to form a subcommittee on pension reform under the County Board Finance Committee.

The report also said she plans to immediately centralize the county's fleet of vehicles and look into ways of ending a “tax subsidy” to unincorporated areas.

“County government will recover from residents in unincorporated areas the cost of services provided only to these areas,” the report said, citing zoning regulation as an example. She said that either those unincorporated areas should be reclassified as part of a municipality or subject to new fees, such as what village and city residents pay for municipal services.

First, however, will come the 2011 budget, with its $487 million deficit, and the 21 percent cuts across the board she is trying to impose on other countywide elected officials. The budget has to be balanced and passed by the county board by the end of February.

Preckwinkle's report was prepared with online input from citizens along with committees comprising about 80 civic leaders in the public and private sector under the auspices of the Civic Consulting Alliance.

Many of the measures fleshed out themes Preckwinkle sounded in her inaugural address on Monday, such as the need to open and reform the budget process, centralize county operations to improve efficiencies, ease conditions at the county jail through alternative sentencing for nonviolent offenders and, of course, fully roll back the 1-percentage-point increase in the county sales tax imposed by her predecessor, Todd Stroger.

The report echoes that Preckwinkle intends to return the county sales tax to 0.75 percent by the beginning of 2013. She also intends to impose a moratorium on nonessential capital projects and service contracts and streamline management.

Those figured in long-term goals as well, along with improving tax collection, especially in cigarette-tax compliance, and by imposing stiffer penalties on late property-tax payments, and turning responsibility for policing the forest preserves over to the sheriff's office.

Fulfilling an early promise to improve openness, Preckwinkle posted the report on the cookcountygov.com website.