Longtime resident Judy Cast, said she had heard CalCom on her police scanner, called this out at Tuesday's Village Board Meeting. Initially Mayor David Hanks and Kowalski denied that the phones went down, but later during the meeting after Kowalski walked out into the hallway and was seen on his phone, came back in and corrected himself.
To confirm the fact that the phone lines were down, calls were made to CalCom's Dispatch center and nobody answered the calls for nearly 30 minutes.
This has not been the first hiccup with CalCom and Sauk Village. It has been previously reported that CalCom could not dispatch calls for two hours in October and that earlier on they could not properly dispatch the Sauk Village Fire Department by properly toning out fire calls. Sauk Village had it's own dispatchers since the 1960s. Hanks rushed through the approval of the CalCom contract following the April election when two of Hanks' allied Trustees whom he controlled did not win and voted to approve the contract with CalCom during the lame-duck days of their terms. Village Trustees allied with Hanks who voted for the CalCom contract are Rosie Williams, Ed Myers and Lynda Washington.
The State of Illinois mandated that dispatch centers serve populations of 25,000 or greater to save money, however, CalCom still is not within the State mandate.
Also Cast blasted the fact that the Village spent over $200,000 on computer equipment for the Police and Fire Departments so that it could work with CalCom's dispatch software and to date the equipment still is not functioning. None of the money was included in the Village's budget, nor in the Village's appropriations ordinance according to some Village Trustees. Hanks voted to break the tie in 2015 to pass the Village's budget.
"This did not save the Village money, who are they kidding" Cast said.
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