For the second time in less than three years the Cook County Sheriff’s office is assisting a south suburb with one its basic services to residents.
For the second time in less than three years the Cook County Sheriff’s office is assisting a south suburb with one its basic services to residents. On Wednesday Sheriff Tom Dart dispatched a group of offenders with the county’s Work Alternative Program to Ford Heights to clean areas where waste was dumped illegally. The village is no longer able to pay for bulk trash pickup. “Residents have dumped their trash in abandoned buildings, which are magnets for bad people and that is my concern,” Dart told the Defender. “It’s a daunting task (the cleanup) but we cannot just leave the village unattended.” While the village still picks up residential and commercial trash, in 2009 it stopped picking up bulk items, such as furniture, mattresses and appliances, due to budget constraints, according to newly elected Ford Heights Mayor Charles Griffin. “We (my administration) inherited a tremendous task. There are a lot of things going in Ford Heights,” Griffin said. Among those things is security for the village, home to about 3,456 residents, which has been handled by the Cook County Sheriff’s police since April 2008 when the village could no longer afford to maintain its own police department. Copyright 2010 Chicago Defender
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