Oak Park has literally tons of coins collected from parking meters sitting in Village Hall after a contracted armored-car company abruptly stopped picking up the coins. (Photo by Bill Dwyer/for Chronicle Media)

At first glance, we’d all like to have the problem near west suburban Oak Park currently has: tons of cash lying around.

But it’s become a real problem. After the village’s contracted armored-car company abruptly stopped picking up coins collected from the village’s 1,500 parking meters, officials were left scrambling to find a way to store a steadily growing pile of quarters, dimes and nickels as they searched for a new armored service.

Village Manager Cara Pavlicek said Wednesday the problem started in early February, when, she said, the armored car company contracted by the village stopped taking loose coins to the bank.

“They just quit doing it,” she said.

Chief Financial Officer Craig Lesner called the company after village cashiers told him they hadn’t seen or heard from them for three days.

“We’re not allowed to count coins. We’re not a bank,” Pavlicek said Lesner was told.

Pavlicek said the village is looking forward to the day that all parking meters are fully digitized and coins are no longer used in them, but that day is still a ways off. In the meantime, coins are piling up at a rate only the tooth fairy could love.

The village has slowed down collections, to once a week instead of twice weekly. But as anyone who has driven around looking for a parking space knows, parking space is in high demand in Oak Park.

Some numbers show the village’s predicament. The estimated 1,500 parking meters are regulated 10 hours a day, six days a week (from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Saturday). Each meter costs between 75 cents and $1 an hour.

If each meter is fully utilized, it generates $45 to $60 per week, $67,500 to $90,000 in total. Figuring a conservative 70 percent use of all available meters each week, including broken meters, collections total between $47,250 and $63,000 weekly.

According to the U.S. Mint, the weight of 10 dimes is equal to the weight of four quarters. Nickels, on the other hand, weigh nearly as much as quarters.

So assuming for the purpose of easier math that the vast majority of coins collected are quarters and dimes, the average weight of each dollar taken from a meter is 22.68 grams.

That works out to 2,400 to 3,150 pounds of coins per week. At four weeks and counting.

“It is the most annoying thing,” Pavlicek said — of the volume of coins, that is, not their value.

It’s also a sensitive issue, having upwards of a quarter million dollars stored in Village Hall. Pavlicek hesitated to state exactly where the coins are being kept, although numerous sources say it’s in the police evidence locker.

They’re transferred from the collection bags to secure plastic evidence bags before being checked into the evidence locker.

Help is finally on the horizon, Pavlicek said. “Yesterday we identified a viable service,” she said, one arranged through Forest Park National Bank.

The catch is a new bank account has to be established for the coins to be deposited into, and the Village Board, which must formally approve any new financial accounts, doesn’t meet until March 7.

Starting March 8, the new armored serviced will pick up some six tons of coins, count them, drive them to Forest Park and deposit them in the bank.

Oak Park will no longer be, as they say, rollin’ in the dough. But they won’t be buried under it either.