Chicago Police Department Supt. Garry McCarthy met with residents from the 19th and 23rd districts earlier this week to hash out Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s designs to merge the area’s police stations.

The plan, which will see the closing of the 19th District “Belmont” station, at 2452 W. Belmont Ave., and its officers moved to the 23rd District “Town Hall” facility at 850 W. Addison St., is part of Emanuel’s proposal to cover an expected $635.7 million deficit in next year’s city budget. The mayor announced in October that he intended to implement a number of facility mergers within the city’s police and fire departments, including similar consolidations at stations in the 13th and 21st districts.

But on the eve of the City Council’s budget vote, McCarthy told residents at a meeting on Tuesday night that he saw the consolidations as more of an institutional benefit for the department than a budgetary band-aid.

“The key question — and the mayor asked me this over and over again — is ‘would we want to do what we are doing if there was no financial impact?’” he said. “And my answer, quite consistently, was ‘yes.’”

The mergers, which are expected to save the city up to $5 million per district, will cut the police department’s number of area deputy chiefs, who oversee district commanders, from five to three.

McCarthy, who took the CPD’s top position June, said that this reduction in regional heads will allow the department to create efficiencies by “putting authority in the district commander’s hands and then holding them accountable for what happens.”

As news of the merger plan came to light over the last month, the question of whether the consolidations would affect police staffing levels was echoed in all the affected districts.

But at the meeting, McCarthy said there would be no drawdown of beat officers between the 19th and 23rd district areas, adding that only about eight administrative and non-street positions would be cut at the merged station.

McCarthy added that he was opposed to reallocating beat officers to areas of higher crime — a contentious topic in the North Side districts, were incidents of crime have dropped to some of the city’s lowest levels over the past decade.

“I’m not willing to push down on a balloon,” he said. “I don’t want to push down here and have it pop up here. So our commitment is to keeping the cops where they are.”

Some residents asked what strategies the superintendent had in mind regarding the merged district’s handling of public disturbance issues linked to the bar crowds around Wrigley Field and on stretches of Lincoln Avenue. As for how officers in those areas would operate following the merger, McCarthy said he would leave those details to the district heads.

“I won’t be telling the commanders what to do,” the superintendent said.

When asked whether the districts’ Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy meetings would be affected by the merger, McCarthy hinted that the program might be up for an overhaul.

“The CAPS system is something that I like [in terms of] the concept, and I like some of the structure of it, and I think we can do it better,” he said. “As far as the numbers of folks doing it and the frequency of the beat meetings, I really can’t speak to [that]. I haven’t gotten there.”

Regarding the future of the 19th District building, a CPD official at the meeting said that the lock-up facilities at the station would be maintained to hold male and female prisoners in custody. The building also contains a Cook County Court facility.

As the consolidations move forward, McCarthy said that his administration was currently looking into how to strengthen communication systems both within the department and with the public.

“I sit in meetings and I give my upper echelon marching orders … then I speak to policemen on the street and I find out that the message never reached them, and it’s very troubling to me,” he said. “We have an opportunity now to make that work better.”

McCarthy said that the district consolidations would start around the beginning of January, with complete consolidation expected by the end of 2012.

The meeting, held at Lakeview High School, was attended by about ninety residents, along with aldermen Scott Waguespack (32nd), Michele Smith (43rd), Tom Tunney (44th) and Ameya Pawar (47th).