City-County Collaboration Identifies Savings

First Quarter Report Released


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Mayor Rahm EmanuelMayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle highlighted the successful first three months of city-county collaboration on Tuesday, and announced that the task force has identified $11 million in savings.

“We are pursuing every option to promote good government and provide better services for taxpayers, which will result in $11 million in savings of taxpayer dollars for 2012,” said Mayor Emanuel. “We’re not going to stop there, and will continue to look for opportunities to provide better, more efficient services to our residents.”

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The savings that have been identified are for 2012, and will include a $4 million savings in custodial costs, $1 million in facilities maintenance, $1.1 million in IT support services, and $2.9 million in procurement.

“This committee is focused on finding areas of collaboration,” said Preckwinkle. “This means not only looking

 for additional savings for taxpayers, but also finding other areas for cooperation to improve services for residents.”

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle

To that end, the committee has added a 20th area of collaboration to the 19 areas that were originally agreed upon: Anti-Violence Strategies and Community Stabilization.

The City and County have also focused heavily on increased collaboration in the area of homeland security. They are enhancing the safety and security of our Urban Area by developing a shared vision of preparedness.

Through coordinating with respect to goals and objectives, planning joint training and exercises and leveraging efficiencies with respect to developing joint-procurement policies, Cook County and the City of Chicago have undertaken unprecedented levels of cooperation and coordination with respect to developing a homeland security strategy.

This new approach to enhancing the ability of our first responders within the City of Chicago and throughout Cook County to prepare for, prevent against, respond to and recover from any incident - whether manmade or natural - was recently recognized by the federal government in their grant of over $54 million to continue our domestic preparedness efforts.

The city-county collaboration expects to bring savings of $66 million to $140 million by 2014.

On Monday, Cook County Commissioner John Fritchey announced plans to eliminate the office of the Cook County Recorder of Deeds through a countywide voter referendum and to merge the functions into the Cook County Clerk’s office. Fritchey maintains that merging the two offices will allow for more efficient service to the public, while saving approximately $1 million each year. For more information, view the PDF of the full press release below.

To read the complete first quarter report from the City-County Collaboration, visit the PDF and links below.

 

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