City Council poised to wrap up budget season in record time - Chicago Sun-Times

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Mayor Lori Lightfoot likes to celebrate her budget victories with a steak, a Scotch and a cigar.

After Wednesday’s City Council vote culminated the most tranquil budget season in recent memory, she might want add dessert to the menu.

Lightfoot’s $16.7 billion budget sailed through the City Council, 35 to 15, thanks to an avalanche of federal stimulus funds that paved the way for an unprecedented 30% increase in city spending.

“There is something for everyone,” License Committee Chairman Emma Mitts (37th) told her colleagues after two hours of debate began, shortly before 10:30 a.m.

Education Committee Chairman Michael Scott Jr. (24th) cited the $50 million for “street interventions” to tamp down violence and the increased spending for mental health.

Scott applauded the mayor for skillfully navigating the “tightrope walk between doing what is fiscally prudent and investing in” the city’s neediest residents.

Chicago’s property tax levy will rise by $76.5 million — on the heels of a $94 million hike in real estate taxes last year.

The increase includes: $22.9 million which kicks in automatically, tied to the consumer price index; $25 million to bankroll the 2022 installment of Lightfoot’s $3.7 billion capital plan; and $28.6 million captured from “new property.”

The increase — minus the new property — is expected to cost the owner of a home valued at $250,000 an extra $38-a-year.

At least a dozen “no” votes are expected against the property tax increase. But Lightfoot easily sloughed off a demand from downtown Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd) and the Hispanic Caucus to repeal the automatic escalator at a time when homeowners and business owners are already reeling from skyrocketing reassessments.

Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce President Jack Lavin made a similar plea on behalf of businesses bracing for a fundamental shift in how business property is assessed.

What the mayor has called a “once in a lifetime opportunity to transform” Chicago allowed Lightfoot to play Santa Claus, instead of Grinch.

That’s even after using about two-thirds of federal relief money to replace revenues lost to the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. She salted away $537.4 million of it to use in 2022 and 2023.

“I feel like Christmas has come early. Everybody seems to be getting what they want. We have a $16 billion spending spree going on,” said Ald. Ray Lopez (15th), one of the mayor’s most outspoken City Council critics.

Lopez explained his “no” vote by pointing to the 4,000 vacant positions in the 2022 budget — positions Lightfoot has “no plans to fill,” he said.

“We could have given our taxpayers a $300 million break if we had merely decided to end those vacancies alone,” Lopez added. “We did the same hat trick last year. Get ready for more of the same next year.”

To reduce poverty made worse by the pandemic, Chicago will set aside $31.5 million to launch a one-year test of a concept known as universal basic income.

Under the plan, the city will send $500 checks, no strings attached, to 5,000 needy Chicago families. Lightfoot has called it the largest such program in the nation.

Civic Federation President Laurence Msall called that program, championed by Ald. Gilbert Villegas (36th), chairman of the Council’s Hispanic Caucus, a “worthy experiment.” But Msall also is concerned about dependency.

“It’s only for one year. Or, at the most, two years. City finance officials have assured us that there is no ongoing commitment once this money is passed out. But will there be an expectation by those recipients that more people will get that money, or they will continue to get it, even after the federal stimulus money is no longer available?” he said.

Lightfoot moved up the budget process by a month to coincide with the unveiling of her plan to spend federal relief funds.

She ended up using 68% of that relief money for revenue replacement. That freed up the city’s corporate fund to repay a $450 million line of credit used to eliminate a pandemic-induced shortfall and cancel $500 million in refinancing.

Still, she managed to earmark $1.2 billion for new investments by pooling $563 million in federal money with the $660 million that represents the 2022 installment of her capital plan.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot presiding at Wednesday’s meeting of the Chicago City Council.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

Christmas also comes early in Chicago with: $202 million to reduce homelessness; $52 million for mental health initiatives, including $15 million to expand a pilot program for alternative responses for mental health emergencies; $150 million for youth programming; and $85 million for violence intervention.

To combat global warming, the budget calls for planting 75,000 new trees over the next five years while reducing the year-long wait to get a tree trimmed by nearly doubling the number of crews.

There’s a $20 million Artist Relief and Works Fund, including $10 million in relief funds and a matching $10 million “dedicated revenue stream” from the corporate budget that will “no longer be subject to the vagaries of the hotel tax.”

The budget also includes several new or enhanced programs to relieve the burden on low-income Chicagoans driven into debt and bankruptcy by the city’s over-reliance on ticket revenues.

That includes so-called “fix-it tickets” for certain compliance violations, such as an invalid or missing city sticker, and a 50% reduction in tickets for low-income drivers.

In the horse-trading before the final vote, Lightfoot also ratcheted up investments to satisfy Council demands.

“When it was time to bend, you did. When it was time to [stand] steadfast, you did,” indicted Ald. Carrie Austin (34th) told Budget Director Susie Park.

“I wanted to extract some more money out of you. But you weren’t budging.”

Austin then directly addressed the mayor who dumped her as Budget Committee chairman and, after her indictment, forced her out as chairman of the Committee on Contracting Oversight and Equity.

“These are trying times for all of us. They are trying times for you. But I know you’ve done 100% for the people who elected you,” Austin told Lightfoot.

Lightfoot resisted demands to reopen mental health clinics shuttered by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, but did agree to increase staffing 72% at the five city clinics that remain open. That includes 18 additional staffers and expanded evening hours.

Other eleventh-hour concessions include more money for homeless outreach, single-room-occupancy buildings, food equity, forestry, marketing at the Commission on Animal Care and Control and additional city planners to oversee land sales.

In response to aldermanic concerns, an oversight sub-committee chaired by Budget Committee Chairman Pat Dowell (3rd) is also being created to ride herd over ver ohow the city spends federal relief funds.

With those changes — and more — the progressive agenda that can never be fully satisfied is, at the very least, appeased.

“This is not a perfect budget. That’s not possible. But there are critical investments at a time when we need it most,” said Ald. Matt Martin (47th).

Ald. Andre Vasquez (40th) said his “comrades” in the Socialist Caucus should be “proud of what we fought to win for our people.”

“We have meaningful, historic, once-in-a-generation investments in violence prevention, in public mental health and non-police crisis response. ... We provide support for our unhoused populations, cash assistance for those families that needed to be sustained during the pandemic, support for our local businesses and a landmark investment in our environment,” Vasquez said.

Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35th) said he was supporting the 2022 budget “to support those things that progressives want and our communities fought for.”

But Ramirez-Rosa tried to have it both ways — decrying the fact that “over half a billion” in federal funds “will effectively be given to Chase Bank” as well as Lightfoot’s decision to “continue to fund policing and jails more than the things that are actually proven to keep us safe.”

“That’s why I’ll be voting no on the fiscal 2020 and 2021 budget amendment,” he said.

Ald. Sophia King (4th), chairperson of the Progressive Caucus, called the budget a “progressive win” and a “win for our most vulnerable.”

“The tragic toll of this pandemic, coupled with a racial reckoning and social unrest, has been felt across our city and has shaken us to our core. Yet, it has informed us on where our budget priorities need to be for — not just 2022, but for years to come,“ King said.

“Intentionally combatting structural inequities must inform everything we do if we are to survive as a world-class city.”

Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th) chided his colleagues for having “settled for $5 million of the $70 million commitment” needed for single-room-occupancy buildings and transitional housing.

“In the middle of a pandemic and in the [cold] weather, we allowed the mayor to continue to turn her back on 80,000 unhoused people and people who have unstable housing who go from shelter to shelter,” Sigcho-Lopez said.

Last year Lightfoot balanced her budget by, in part, eliminating 614 Chicago Police Department vacancies and shrinking CPD by attrition.

This year, she’s increasing CPD spending by $189 million — to just under $1.9 billion. Park has said the “full driver” of that increase is the new police contract, with its 20% pay raise over eight years.

Meanwhile, the tidal wave of police retirements continues with 703 retirements already this year and 987 sworn vacancies.

Far Northwest Side Ald. Anthony Napolitano (41st), downtown Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd) and Ald. Matt O’Shea (19th) wanted Lightfoot to restore some positions. But the mayor has argued CPD will have enough trouble just filling the 1,000 vacancies.

“The number one issue in our city is violence. If we cannot gain control of the violence on our streets, it will undercut everything we are trying to do,” said Housing Committee Chairman Harry Osterman (48th).

“What violence has taken from Chicago families is a pandemic. We need to address it with a plan, with re-imagined support services and unity as Chicago leaders....We need to work closer together...We need to fill the police vacancies and properly train our next generation of officers. To address violence, we need to deploy those officers where they need to be. That’s in our districts where, block-by-block, they can build trust.”

Despite the political euphoria that will surely come with having put the budget to bed in record time, Msall warned Chicago is hardly out of the woods.

Although the city has “climbed the ramp” to actuarial funding for all four pension funds, there is still no long-term funding source from Springfield, like a tax on retirement income or a sales tax on professional services. Nor has the General Assembly heeded the Civic Federation’s call for a state constitutional amendment eliminating the pension protection clause going forward.

Msall also remains concerned about the mayor’s continued reliance on one-time revenues, the city’s mountain of debt and about her plan to refinance $1.2 billion more and use $232 million of the savings to bankroll four years of back pay for Chicago Police officers.

He’s equally concerned about what will happen “when the federal ARP money goes away” — particularly if the $153 million in federal relief reserved for revenue replacement in 2023 is not enough.

“What’s Plan B if the city does not recover at the aggressive and robust growth that the city is hoping for? We need to have a Plan B? Will we try to raise taxes if the economic disruption caused by the pandemic continues? Will we make structural changes? Will we be cutting?” he said.

“In likelihood, it’s going to have to be a combination of all of that. But if we don’t see a return where business travel comes back, where convention attendance [comes] back, the city is going to have a hard to meeting its debt obligations for many of the key investments that those industries support.”

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City Council poised to wrap up budget season in record time - Chicago Sun-Times
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