30 Business View Magazine - April 2016
with a pool and community center,” he says. “And the
park district is in the process of upgrading all of those.”
Keeping its residents safe and secure is yet another
responsibility of Village management, so Arlington
Heights will soon be building a new, state-of-the-art
police facility that, according to Recklaus, will help al-
low the village to remain a leader among Chicago’s
northwest suburbs in the area of public safety. “We
have an extremely low crime rate,” he states. “It went
down 15 percent last year; it will go down another 12
percent when the 2015 numbers are all wrapped up.
We’re consistently ranked in the hundred safest com-
munities in the United States. Of the 437 communities
in the U.S. that have a population of 75,000 or over,
in the last two years, we have been in the top five for
lowest crime rate. It’s something that we’re very proud
of and take very seriously.”
As Arlington Heights looks toward the future, Hayes
credits the Village’s recent resurgence to plans put
in place decades ago. “We just completed an update
to our Village Comprehensive Plan, which is a vision
statement for what we would like the Village to look
like in future years,” he says. “But one of the reasons
for our great success over the past 20 to 30 years is
that we’ve stuck to the comprehensive plan that vil-
lage planners and leaders have had for this commu-
nity for many, many years before.”
