Riverside has the opportunity to recover over $13,000 that a Cook County judge ordered the village to pay back to cell phone companies in 2005 after declaring a utility tax unconstitutional.
The Riverside Board of Trustees adopted a resolution on Dec. 4 allowing Fire Chief Kevin Mulligan to submit a grant application to a review board created by the court seeking $13,732 to be put toward upgrades to the village’s E-911 system.
The grant would allow the village to recover all of the money it paid back to cell companies as a result of the court’s ruling.
Between Jan. 1, 1998 and Feb. 7, 2002, municipalities across the state of Illinois charged cell phone companies and their customers a municipal infrastructure fee of 1 percent after then-Giv. Jim Edgar signed into law a bill allowing the fee to be imposed.
But PrimeCo Wireless filed a lawsuit in 1998, arguing that the infrastructure fee was unconstitutional. The Illinois Supreme Court ruled in PrimeCo’s favor in 2001, and the law was taken off the books in 2002.
PrimeCo settled its claim against Riverside and 219 other towns in August 2005, with Riverside paying the company $310. PrimeCo settled its suit with Brookfield along with other towns in 2004; the village paid the company $5,677.
On the heels of PrimeCo’s success in court, other wireless providers filed a class-action lawsuit against Illinois municipalities to recoup some $17 million in infrastructure fees that they had paid during that same period. In 2005, both sides settled, with municipalities agreeing to pay 70 percent of the total collected from the companies during 1998-2002.
Riverside was socked with another $13,421 bill as a result of the settlement agreement, while Brookfield coughed up just over $81,000.
Finding it too onerous to reimburse individual cell phone customers, the court set up a review board that would disburse the money back to the municipalities in the form of a grant to be used to improvements to E-911 systems, which would benefit customers.
“The court set up a system to acknowledge that the village was collecting fees we felt were legal,” said Village Manager Kathleen Rush. “To reimburse those fees to the user is impossible.”
Because Riverside was part of a group of towns that joined the class-action suit as defendants represented by attorneys provided by the Illinois Municipal League, it is able to recover the money it was ordered to pay back in the form of the E-911 grant.
In 2003, the members of the Brookfield village board declined to enter into the class action suit as a defendant. As a result, it does not have the ability to recoup the penalty it paid for its E-911 system under terms of the class-action suit settlement.