BY DANI TIETZ
dani@sjodaily.com
Disasters are unpredictable.
But, it is imperative to have a select group of people who prepare for the unpredictable.
St. Joseph’s Jim Page is one who prepares.
Page has been one running to a disaster when everyone else wants to run away.
He’s not much of a “sitter,” anyway. That he has always known.
While Page entered Illinois State University (ISU) in 1972 not knowing what he wanted to study, his path was set for him on a snowy winter night in Springfield when he witnessed a cop car dashing toward an accident on I-55.
“I said, that’s what I want to do,” he recalled. “I went back to school after Christmas break and said, ‘Does ISU have a criminal justice or law enforcement program?’”
At the time, ISU did not.
Page picked up his world and moved to Northern Arizona University where he studied police science administration before becoming the assistant chief of a small part-time staff serving 1,200 people.
Within a few years, Page found his way back to Central Illinois, where he spent the next 29 years at the Urbana Police Department.
By the age of 50, Page was worn down in the day-to-day of response and discipline. He planned to retire as Deputy Chief in 2004.
But even after three decades of public service, Page knew there was still more to do.
After Sept. 11, 2001, he joined a 21-member board that supervised the $16 million budget of the Illinois Law Enforcement Alarm system (ILEAS) to be used in bringing first responders together in prevention, response, mitigation and recovery of disasters within the State of Illinois.
It was a vision on paper, really. Page’s law enforcement retirement gave ILEAS the perfect Senior Administrator candidate to turn that vision on paper into a reality.
“It was just me,” Page said. “These boxes here on the floor, they handed me those boxes and said, ‘that’s ILEAS.’ Get us an office. Get us an address. Get us a webpage. Get us a phone number.’”
Now the 31-member team with a $5 to $7 million budget funded mostly by Homeland Security grants, is stationed in an abandoned medical facility at 1701 E. Main St., Urbana.
“We’ve been here since 2007,” Page said. “I walked through it and said ‘I think we can do something with this.’ And people said ‘You’re crazy,’ Because it looked bad and smelled.”
Page began to build ILEAS by hiring accountants and bookkeepers to stay on top of the financial records that would come under scrutiny under the Grant Accountability and Transparency Act.
“We got a reputation early on as being a good grant compliance agency,” Page said.
That has led to ILEAS qualifying for grants that aren’t law-enforcement related. In 2019, they received money to buy stop-bleed tourniquet kits for every public school in Illinois.
“We got to buy about 7-8,000 of those kits, and then distributed them to the 4,000 school buildings in the state,” Page said.
“They gave us that because they know we can turn that around and get those bids, get that done, get that distributed, and account for the money appropriately.”
A $3 million building rehab revitalized the space into a training center by 2008 where emergency management training and planning takes place. The old hospital and nursing home facility provides the perfect area classroom education and tactical training to take place.
Page expanded his team, bringing on computer experts, emergency management personnel, facilities management and ex-police officers.
But those are just employees of ILEAS. The organization’s reach branches out to 1,024 law enforcement agencies in Illinois.
The ILEAS operation operates under the Mutual Aid Agreement, part of the Intergovernmental Cooperation Act, that allows two municipalities to work with a third agency.
With 11 retired law enforcement (Regional Planning Coordinators) stationed throughout the state to build relationships with local municipalities, ILEAS is able to strategically plan for the unthinkable when an emergency situation arises.
“The whole state is covered,” Page said.
ILEAS employees help collect information on what local agencies need as far as equipment and training, alongside making sure that their certification is current.
The network of public service not only provides an avenue to get tools or equipment in emergency situations, but also gives teams, both big and small, a way to problem solve and share stories about what has worked and what didn’t.
Page said he saw the benefits of every process and tool ILEAS had when a tornado ripped through Hillsboro in 2016. Because he had experienced being the command officer after a tornado ripped through Urbana in 1996, he knew what leaders in Hillsboro would be facing.
“There’s a line of people, you’re trying to manage this thing, your phone’s going off constantly, there’s a line of people coming at you and you get mired down in the details.”
To help local municipalities handle those chaotic situations, ILEAS employs a Regional Planning Coordinator who has helped community leaders process through the aftermath of tornadoes; not making operational decisions, but helping them know what will come next.
“Our guy comes down and says ‘Look, this is your first tornado; this is my 12th tornado. This is what you need to pay attention to.’”
Not only can the Regional Planning Coordinator help the community leaders delegate tasks, but also help them know what might happen next as any town immediately tries to supply aide and rebuild.
“It makes (the community leaders) more effective.”
With a vast network of resources, ILEAS is also able to get equipment and tools needed on-site.
“We know where every piece of law enforcement equipment is in Illinois,” Page said. “We have a database, and we have contact information for each one.”
Access to equipment like radios may seem trivial in the moment, but ILEAS has learned that one system cuts down on miscommunication when teams from around the state come in with different equipment.
“It’s all programmed and it solves the communications problem,” Page said. “When local comm towers are taken down, we have mobile towers on trucks and trailers, and we can haul and throw the antenna up. If a dispatch center gets hit by lightning, we have rack-mounted big transceivers.”
“It’s not like we go and take over during disasters,” Page said. “We go and support them.”
Working with 900 agencies, 25,000 police officers in the state — 36,000 if you count Chicago — ILEAS puts the programs, training and resources in place to get everyone going down the same road.
Many times, Illinois officers will go out-of-state to provide aide to other regions, too.
The training that ILEAS provides allows them, even if they are from different units, to operate cohesively.
“We’ve sent 287 officers to the NATO Summit in Chicago, 150 officers to Pittsburgh for the G20 Summit, 300 officers to Katrina, 100 officers to Minneapolis for the Republican National Convention,” Page said.
“None of those officers know each other, but they know the rules. They know the training, that we have a central command officer, each one of the eight officers has a sergeant, a squad leader, then there’s an assistant commander.”
The teams may not know each other, but they do know the equipment they are required to use.
“We really focus on sending our special teams to a lot of special events,” Page said.
“They’re practicing what you need to do. It’s not like buying a piece of equipment and saying don’t use that unless it’s a disaster. We buy equipment, they use it all the time. So when the disaster happens, they are prepared to use it.”
The group knows how to take care of its own, too.
A flood in Hardin County put a sheriff and three deputies tending to their hometown for three days while their own homes were flooding.
“The state asks us to send people,” Page said. “We got 70 officers down there. The commander sends one of the squad leaders and eight officers to Hardin County to tell the sheriff and these officers to go home, take care of their business.”
Tornadoes and floods are expected in the Midwest, though.
There are other situations, nightmares that have not yet happened, that ILEAS prepares local law enforcement agents for. Since 2004, ILEAS has operated under the assumption and realization that terrorists or weapons of mass destruction (WMD) would attack the United States.
For this reason, ILEAS trains two WMD special response teams.
“These are SWAT teams on steroids,” Page said. “They all have 25 to 30 officers each.”
Page said while the State has its own WMD team, ILEAS is also available to help if the need should arise.
“(Our teams) have millions of dollars of chemical and biological warfare equipment,” he said. “They’ve been to the advanced federal SWAT training, they’ve got a full complement of nuclear detection capability, and they can operate in contaminated environments.”
The training takes place in Alabama.
“They get the confidence in their equipment that they can go into a contaminated environment,” Page said.
“Most of the time, you’re not going to go into a contaminated environment because most everybody in there is dead. But when a guy is in a building who says I have chlorine bomb, and I’m going to blow this place up and flood the place with chlorine, well then, you have to go in and get that guy.
“So you have to be able to get into that gear and be a SWAT guy while wearing all that.”
ILEAS has access to bomb suits, robots that detect radiation and x-ray devices so that law enforcement has bomb response capabilities.
Even though the WMD team has not taken one call since 2004, Page said the federally-funded training provides benefits to all communities throughout the state of Illinois. Training for hostage situations, bomb response, natural disasters, research and facilities provide a cohesive unit that is prepared when the unpredictable happens.
Page said the vision of ILEAS is to make sure all of the little things are done right so those big things fall into place when a situation is chaotic.
“That’s our message,” he said.
Although Page spends his days preparing the moments when humans produce the “most heinous depth of evil that you can imagine,” for the most part, he works with people and serves people who are capable of the “greatest compassionate, loving, awesome and heroic acts.”
“Overall, people are generally good and want good things for themselves and their families,” he said.
“I think there’s more great than evil in the world,” Page said. “Because if there if there was more evil than great, it would be chaos all the time.”
Almost 50 years after the first time Page realized he wanted to be one who ran towards those who needed help, he still isn’t sure when it’s time to move on to something else.
In his downtime now, he’s running towards making St. Joseph a better community. He said an ongoing community development project might be a good transition from his professional life into retirement.
Over the last year, Page has worked towards making a vision for the St. Joseph Community Sports Complex a reality. He’d like to see youth sports programming grow, new fields be built, extensions of walking paths throughout the community and a community center.
“I will never sit down,” Page said. “(My family) knows that the only time I’m going to sit down is when I physically can’t, mentally can’t, do anything.
“I cannot not be doing something.”
