Aldermen pass Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s $16 billion election-year budget; crime and policing prominent issues in debate

Chicago aldermen approved Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s $16.4 billion election-year spending plan for 2023 Monday in a tighter-than-expected vote that reflected ongoing anxiety over her leadership.

After hours of speeches for and against Lightfoot’s budget — many focused on steady anxiety over crime and debate over how to best spend funds to combat city violence — aldermen voted 32-18 on the spending plan, but split 29-21 on her property tax levy.

With local elections now less than four months away, Lightfoot’s administration designed her budget to be as uncontroversial as possible and without a property tax levy increase, though in typical Lightfoot administration fashion, it ended with a series of fights.

At a post-council news conference, Lightfoot said she was unconcerned about the relatively narrow margin of victory and called her spending plan a “budget we can all be proud of.”

“Anything over 26 to me is gravy,” she said.

As part of her budget, Lightfoot initially proposed a property tax increase tied to inflation but eventually dropped it in a move that seemed designed to avoid a hard vote during election season.

With the property tax off the table, aldermen focused on smaller pieces of contention. Lightfoot faced criticism, for instance, over a measure she pushed giving the next mayor an automatic annual raise tied to inflation, though the mayor can opt out of the pay hike.

Lightfoot also faced pushback from aldermen upset with her decision not to create a Department of the Environment, even though she campaigned vigorously on the idea in 2019. She has touted money in the budget for a much-smaller Office for Climate and Environmental Equity, staffed with fewer than a dozen positions.

One of the more striking moments on the City Council floor was a speech from Lakeview Ald. Tom Tunney, 44th, a possible mayoral contender. He voted no, saying he was “pained” but had no choice because of what he said was lack of preparedness in running the city’s bonding program for capital improvements as well as entrenched public safety concerns.

“My residents don’t feel safe,” Tunney said. “They don’t feel their money is worth it, and my police officers’ morale is at an all-time low. You know it, I know it, whether it’s on the West Side or the South Side or the North Side.”

One alderman who voted no used his time while he had the floor Monday to respond to remarks Lightfoot made last week saying certain aldermen were not sufficiently “pro-police” because they didn’t support her budget.

To that, Ald. Brendan Reilly, 42nd, said the mayor was being “intellectually dishonest and wrong” because he believes he is one of the strongest pro-law enforcement voices on the council. He also described the Chicago Transit Authority as a “dumpster fire” in explaining his “no” vote.

“This budget sends more money to CTA,” Reilly said. “We’re investing more Chicago tax dollars in a failing transit system that is not only unreliable, but is unsafe.”

Ahead of Monday’s vote, Lightfoot had gone on the radio and blasted a member of the City Council, Southwest Side Ald. Matt O’Shea, 19th, for not backing her budget and questioned his support for law enforcement. Lightfoot also criticized “downtown” aldermen, of which Reilly is one.

For his part, O’Shea, who did end up voting no, bristled at the notion that he doesn’t support police and fired back that her spending plan doesn’t do enough to keep cops from retiring at exorbitant rates.

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Still, this budget season’s negotiations are notably muted compared with those of previous years, when some of Lightfoot’s most contentious fights with aldermen broke out. In 2020, she told the Black Caucus, “don’t come to me for s---” if they didn’t support her budget.

Another provision of Lightfoot’s budget that faced scrutiny was the move to lower the maximum combined fines for vehicles blocking bike lanes or containing tinted windows or obscured license plates from $500 to $250. A city Law Department official explained that an Illinois appeals court ruling this year mandated the lower cap, and only an amendment to state law can change that. Aldermen criticized the Lightfoot administration for not addressing the problem, which they said will hurt public safety and the city’s finances.

Outgoing Ald. Leslie Hairston, 5th, blamed the mayor’s office for not utilizing lobbyists in Springfield, leaving City Council blindsided.

“There is a total breakdown of communication,” Hairston said. “We’re sitting here in the dark about everything.”

On policing, the mayor’s budget plan attempts to reflect her ethos that a strong Police Department coupled with street outreach and other holistic programming is the solution to solving the city’s persistent gun violence. Shootings and homicides are down so far this year from a worst-in-decades 2021, but they are still higher than they were before Lightfoot took office.

Before the vote Monday, Ald. Daniel La Spata, 1st, said that, though he backed Lightfoot’s last budget, he could not vote yes this time because he is disillusioned with what he said were priorities that “have fallen on deaf ears” such as homeless prevention and youth anti-violence programming.

“The budget that I voted for last year was encouraging for me for what we were endeavoring to do for this city,” La Spata said. “This (budget) is not it. I wish that it was it.”

That was followed by a speech from outgoing Ald. George Cardenas, 12th, who praised Lightfoot’s spending plan and accused colleagues of nitpicking.

“Don’t tell me it’s raining when it’s sunny,” said Cardenas, who is Lightfoot’s deputy floor leader but has resigned ahead of his expected election Tuesday to the Cook County Board of Review. “Things are happening. … It doesn’t always take as quickly as you would have wanted it to. But there’s intention.”

The lack of a Department of Environment in Lightfoot’s budget was a sticking point for many progressive aldermen who criticized the plan. Ald. Maria Hadden, 49th, noted the recent extreme climate events that plagued her Far North Side ward — a tornado, lakefront erosion as well as deaths of senior residents during a heat wave, all in Rogers Park — and said the city must do more for environmental justice.

“There’s some great investments, but we could have done more,” Hadden said. “We could have done better. And we should.”

Public safety was another topic that surfaced during the many aldermanic speeches ahead of the budget vote. Outgoing Ald. Harry Osterman, 48th, praised aspects of the plan for tackling homelessness but warned his colleagues that there must be better communication with Chicago Police Department leadership before next summer. He also criticized the city for what he said was a slow pace in spending this year’s anti-violence programming funds.

“You go into violence with everything you got — kitchen sink — to knock it down and make it safe,” Osterman said. “We don’t have the luxury to wait and use this money glacially over the next five to 10 years. We have to use it now.”

But some council members said the real mistake in tackling safety in the city was too much funding for Chicago police that could be better spent investing in schools and social services.

“We cannot say that our communities feel safe, that this budget does justice,” Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez, 25th, said before announcing he would vote no. “This is the last opportunity to make sure that the funding goes toward our communities in need.”

Two City Council members who are running to unseat Lightfoot in the 2023 mayoral election also stood up to explain their no votes on her budget.

“I do agree there are a number of good things in this budget,” Ald. Sophia King, 4th, said, listing the pension payment plan and rapid rehousing units. “… But this budget is a reflection of our priorities. And our No. 1, 2, 3 priority in this city right now is safety, gun violence prevention. I do not think that this budget addresses gun violence in a significant way.”

Mayoral hopeful Ald. Raymond Lopez, 15th, concurred, saying: “Send this budget back.”

Ald. Roderick Sawyer, 6th, who is also running for mayor, voted in favor of the budget.

Mayoral allies including Alds. Scott Waguespack, Emma Mitts and Pat Dowell also stood up to defend Lightfoot’s budget in speeches.

Waguespack, 32nd, said the plan will help the city get on better financial footing and disagreed with comments saying it did not do enough for fighting crime.

“We can go in circles about what the police are doing, what the police are not doing,” Waguespack said, noting that the Illinois General Assembly and other bodies also share the responsibility of ensuring safety. “I think the investments that we see in this budget are supporting the Police Department.”

Mitts, 37th, another yes vote, also praised Lightfoot for a proliferation of new development in her West Side ward: “I just keep seeing the cranes in the air, and our community is seeing some hope.”

And Lightfoot’s hand-picked budget chair Dowell, 3rd, argued the city was in a better place than it was four years ago, despite challenges and “difficult votes” to balance previous fiscal gaps with property tax increases. She said demands to stand up a separate Department of Environment “overnight” were not “responsible.”

“I believe this is a compromise, a key word here,” Dowell said about the mayor’s current plan for a smaller climate equity office. “A reasonable one, and exactly the type of compromise we have been asking for since I became chair of the budget committee.”

Three aldermen voted for the appropriations ordinance but against the levy: Roberto Maldonado, 26th; Felix Cardona, 31st; and Debra Silverstein, 50th.

One of the more striking goals of Lightfoot’s budget is to spend $242 million in additional contributions to all four of the city’s pension funds, which the mayor likened to ending the practice of paying only the monthly minimum on a credit card. That would shave $2 billion off future contributions, provided current market performance holds, officials said.

Overall, pension payments would cost $2.7 billion in the 2023 budget, up from $2.3 billion last year. Lightfoot has said better financial planning and cash flow management has led to the city increasing its annual pension contributions by $1 billion over three years and reducing its outstanding debt by $377 million.