Developers soon may have to pay an additional fee to put up homes in Algonquin, which already requires builders to make some of the largest contributions in McHenry County for schools and parks.
This fee, though, may help save lives. The Algonquin-Lake in the Hills Fire Protection District is asking the village to assess a fee of $50 per residence. The fee would help cover the district’s costs to process information about individual homes that assists rescue workers responding to emergencies.
Having information such as a home’s basic floor plan, especially the location of staircases, can save precious time in the event of a fire with people trapped in upstairs bedrooms, said Fire Chief Steve Kite.
“When you enter a house that’s full of smoke,” he said, “you might have no idea where the stairs are, and you’re sometimes wandering around until you find them.”
It also is important to know about features in a home that create weak spots, such as a second-floor Jacuzzi that could come crashing down on firefighters during a blaze.
“The more we know about a structure when we’re responding to a call,” Kite said, “the safer we’re all going to be and the easier our job’s going to be once we get there.”
Kite said the district already collects such information, when possible, during the 4,000 calls it runs each year. The information is entered into its computer-aided dispatch system and can be accessed by emergency operators seeking to print out details about the home, including directions, at the fire station.
The district, the only one in McHenry County with the system, plans to upgrade it this fall. The new $100,000 system will allow emergency workers to retrieve information from laptop computers in their vehicles on the way to the scene.
Once the new system is in place, Kite said, the district hopes to work with the village’s building department to receive information about new homes and the remodeling of existing ones.
Currently, Kite said, it can take four hours a day to enter the information into the system. Bringing the new system on-line will be even more time-intensive.
“We have data on about 11,000 addresses that will have to be transferred,” he said.
Lake in the Hills already charges developers a $50 fee for Fire District services.
Algonquin officials said they are open to the idea but remain somewhat skittish because state law only allows them to assess fees for clearly defined services.
If a developer were to challenge the fee in court, village attorney David Rogers said at a Planning, Building and Zoning Committee meeting last week, “we’re the ones that get sued–not the fire department.”
The committee asked Kite to provide information about the costs of collecting and processing information to justify the fee.
Kite noted that other municipalities–such as Huntley, McHenry and Cary–assess impact fees ranging from $50 to $500 for their fire protection districts. Most, he said, legally justify the fees based on the protection the fire districts provide while a new home is being constructed–before it is on the tax rolls.
The village does reimburse the district for ensuring that new commercial and industrial developments meet fire safety standards. Kite also is asking that this fee be raised from 4 cents per square foot to 10 cents per square foot.
