Preckwinkle, Dart reach budget compromise
Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Sheriff Tom Dart announced a compromise Tuesday in making cuts to his office to balance the proposed 2011 budget.
Dart agreed to cut about 12 percent from his budget last year of $457 million, reducing it to $404 million and estimating it would cost him about 100 layoffs.
Preckwinkle has called on county elected officials to cut their budgets 16 percent across the board to make up an estimated $487 million budget shortfall, but she announced last week she was allowing State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez and the Public Defender’s Office to make 10 percent reductions, while holding Dart to the original 16 percent. Dart had proposed a 9 percent cut.
The two had harsh words for each other last month, with Dart offering to patrol the county on his bicycle, and Preckwinkle questioning the high number of sheriff’s police on family and medical leave — sometimes 20 percent of the force on a given day.
Yet Tuesday they met immediately before Preckwinkle submitted her budget proposal to the County Board and announced the compromise, hammered out in what Preckwinkle called “intense discussions” over the weekend.
“We were both committed to working this out,” Preckwinkle said. “We’re both committed to working together going forward.”
“This has been a difficult process for everyone involved,” Dart acknowledged, adding, “The staffs on both sides did a tremendous job.”
He called the budget crunch “something the president has been stuck with, quite frankly.”
Dart, who has committed to adding correctional officers at Cook County Jail as part of a court settlement, said the layoffs would be “spread around to different departments.”
Preckwinkle added she found the cuts would “reduce his budget significantly, but allow him the flexibility that he needs to run the county jails in accordance with federal mandates and protect our residents.”
Preckwinkle and Dart announced they would form a joint task force to address abuses in family and medical leave and other employee absences, with Dart saying he had also consulted William Foley, chief executive officer of the Health & Hospitals System, to form policies intended “to make sure someone’s not gaming the system.”
Dart added that “working with the President’s Office, we’re expecting to make some bold moves to get our arms around it.”
Preckwinkle and Dart announced the Sheriff’s Office would also handle more judicial sales, resulting largely from home foreclosures, which is standard operating procedure in most other counties, but was farmed out to private firms in Cook about 20 years ago.
“It’s a large amount of revenue,” Dart added. “It’s not new fees being put on people. It’s fees that right now are going to private companies.”
The Sheriff’s Office will start this year by handling about 35 percent of countywide judicial sales, with the goal to eventually take over the entire process.