Residents may not notice a difference, but Wilmette administrators hope a just-completed merger of the village’s public works and engineering staff will save money, improve communications, and streamline infrastructure repair and maintenance services.
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The change, which also spins off Wilmette’s water plant operations as a self-contained department, re-merges engineering and public works operations that were split almost 20 years ago, Village Manager Tim Frenzer said.
Brigitte Berger, who has been Wilmette’s engineering director since 2001, has been named director of the newly named Engineering and Public Works Department, Frenzer said. The department will be located in the former public works building at 711 Laramie Ave.
Nabil Quafisheh, formerly superintendent of Wilmette’s 200 Lake Ave. water plant, is now director of water management for the plant.
Village trustees approved the reorganization, which included amending the village code to recognize the consolidation and changing pay and classification plans to recognize personnel shifts, at their July 14 meeting. The ordinance changes were part of the consent agenda and passed without comment.
The changes are effective immediately.
Frenzer said the departmental merger will eliminate the service overlaps that often happened when residents needed water or other infrastructure services.
“What we should have is better communication and better coordination,” Frenzer said.
Residents will be able to go to one department for all their infrastructure service needs, from sewer and water main problems to tree services and village signage, Assistant Village Manager Michael Braiman told trustees in a July 14 report.
Prior to now, public works handled interim maintenance needs, and engineering handled long-term repair solutions, Braiman said in the report.
Combining the two departments will allow engineers and public works officials to work more closely on capital projects, he said.
The move should also save Wilmette about $220,000 annually because it cuts two full-time public works positions, both of which are currently vacant, Braiman said. Frenzer said Berger’s salary will remain the same. Her 2015 annual salary is listed on the village website as $157,001.
There will be no new employees, but the current position of village civil engineer will be eliminated, and the post of village engineer has been created. The village has not yet filled the latter position, which will carry some of the responsibilities that Berger formerly had as engineering director, Berger said.
Berger said she “couldn’t be happier” with the move.
“Being back in public works is going full circle for me, because I started my career as an intern in public works,” she said.
The reasons officials gave for merging engineering and public works and for separating water plant operations from the first two appear to mirror the reasons officials first separated engineering and public works.
In January 1998, then-Village Manager Heidi Voorhees separated engineering and public works operations and named Donna Jakubowksi, then assistant director for public works, to head the public works. In that story, Voorhees said she was separating the operations to make administration of both more manageable.
The changes at that time happened after the retirement of Richard Hansen, then the director of public works and the village engineer.
Seventeen years later, village officials decided to take a look at the possibility of reorganization in the wake of Jakubowski’s retirement in March, Frenzer said.
In late April the Village Board approved a $27,905 contract with Naperville-based consulting firm Sikich LLP to do an organizational assessment of public works operations. The company interviewed public works staff and analyzed the department’s structure, before looking at options and issuing a final recommendation.
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