Politics
Chicago’s Budget Director on State of Negotiations, New Revenue Plans
The clock is ticking for the city to pass a budget plan.
Last month, the City Council’s Finance Committee declined to advance Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposed spending plan to the full City Council.
A major sticking point centers around a plan to impose a so-called head tax on large companies, which could cost corporations with over 100 employees $21 per employee per month.
After taking a break for the Thanksgiving holiday, alderpeople are coming back to the table with the hope of passing a budget before their deadline at the end of the month.
The full City Council is scheduled to meet Dec. 10. Chicago Budget Director Annette Guzman joined “Chicago Tonight” to discuss the budget negotiations.
What’s the sticking point in negotiations?
“There’s a lot of discussions around: How do we appropriately fund the government?’” Guzman said. “‘How do we make sure that services that are critical to the day-to-day life of residents of the city of Chicago, business in the city of Chicago, as well as people who come to visit our city every single day — how do we ensure that we’re properly providing for those.’” “.... Unfortunately the city of Chicago, because we’re a municipality, has very limited options around what it is that we can produce as it relates to revenue to support those services.”
Have alderpeople suggested their own budget plans?
“What we have heard are sort of reactions to what the mayor has proposed,” Guzman said. “So we’ve had alders who’ve asked us to look at things slightly differently, adjust things, ‘Could we do it this way instead of that way?’” “... As I said before, we welcome those conversations, we’ve been having those conversations, frankly, all year. Obviously a little bit more pronounced and acute now that we’re sort of down to the wire.” “... We keep hearing efficiencies, we keep hearing cuts, but what we don’t hear are specific cuts. We don’t hear what are you willing to go back to your residents and say ‘We’re going to do a little bit less of that next year.’”
Why not implement more cuts or efficiencies into the budget?
A report by the accounting firm Ernst & Young identified between $530 million and $1.4 billion in new revenues and savings. Only $80 million of the cuts are included in Johnson’s proposal.
The report has become a major sticking point in negotiations for some alderpeople, who want to see cuts implemented that the report says could save tens of millions of dollars in the first year.
“In that report it never says what year one is. It says in the first year of full recoupment this is what you could expect. There’s a lot of groundwork that we have to lay to get to year one in a lot of those recommendations, because they’re a new way of operating for the city of Chicago. They’re absolutely right that if we had fleet optimization and we had a lot of the groundwork in place right now for 12 months of the year we would be able to recoup potentially $20 million in savings, but there is a ton of groundwork in how we shift how we operate to get there.”
