Where the Axe Will Fall

Strap in:

• Mayor Rahm Emanuel has talked about laying off more than 500 city employees and eliminating 776 vacant jobs, but he has not identified them or explained what city services will suffer.

  Now, an analysis by the Chicago Sun-Times and one of the impacted unions shows where the ax will fall — in a way that could slow response time to 911 calls or stretch call takers to the limit, decimate Chicago Public libraries and force dramatic cuts in health and human services.

  At the Office of Emergency Management and Communications, where 911 call takers have more than doubled their annual salaries in overtime over the years, the budget calls for 108 layoffs and the elimination of 80 vacancies. Seventy-three of the layoffs are recently fired Loop traffic-control-aides.

  The ranks of police dispatchers would be reduced by 45 or 10.3 percent. The number of fire communications operators would drop by 17 or 16.6 percent.

  “Management … is saying the wait time for a 911 call will go from one-to-three seconds to ten-to-fifteen seconds, possibly more. This is very disturbing,” said an OEMC employee, who asked to remain anonymous.

So not only has the Department gone from proactive to reactive in record time, we're going to go to an even slower reactive posture. And the dispatcher burnout, well, that's just an unfortunate side effect.