Chicago aldermen pass Lightfoot’s $16 billion budget, buoyed by federal COVID-19 relief funds
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Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s $16.7 billion budget for next year, which spreads around federal COVID-19 relief money and features a relatively modest tax hike, got the go-ahead from aldermen Wednesday.
Lightfoot passed her spending package — later calling it “the most progressive and forward-looking budget in our city’s history” — without having to make many changes in order to curry aldermanic favor for the plan. The vote was 35-15.
The accompanying city property tax levy passed 32-18.
Supporters spent more than an hour talking it up in council chambers. West Side Ald. Michael Scott praised Lightfoot for balancing the need to pay down debt the city accrued during the pandemic while spending to try to improve things for struggling Chicagoans.
“There has been a great tightrope walked between making sure we invest in these communities but do not saddle them in the future with what we’re doing today,” Scott said.
The mayor had a fairly easy time getting the budget through council in large part because it was buoyed by an influx of $1.9 billion in federal COVID-19 relief funds. That allowed her to spend significantly on anti-violence programs, affordable housing and mental health initiatives and other community projects lots of aldermen like.
Among those programs is a $31.5 million guaranteed income plan that will provide $500 monthly checks to 5,000 low-income households for a year. Lightfoot has touted it as the “biggest” program of its kind in the country.
“There is something for everyone,” West Side Ald. Emma Mitts said before voting for the budget, ticking off programs she said would uplift residents.
And Progressive Northwest Side Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa took a bow on behalf of grassroots activists who he said pushed Lightfoot to “envision a city that would spend those (federal) dollars in neighborhoods.”
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Also helping the mayor earn council support, her $76.5 million total property tax increase includes the first year of an automatic hike tied to inflation that she pushed through in 2020 and another linked to borrowing for her ongoing capital plan, saving aldermen from having to vote to approve a stand-alone bump to homeowners’ bills.
Though a group of local clergy called this week for the mayor to fund a city Office on Gun Violence, and progressive groups pressed for the city to reopen mental health clinics and to end the controversial ShotSpotter contract, budget negotiations this fall did not see large numbers of council members deciding the proposal was irredeemably flawed.
Wednesday’s votes therefore were less suspenseful than the one for Lightfoot’s 2021 budget, before which her administration working until the final hours to secure aldermanic support for a package that ultimately passed 29-21.
At a news conference that she used as a victory lap, Lightfoot hailed her budget’s passage as an important step in righting the city’s historical inequities, saying her spending plan will benefit each of the city’s neighborhoods.
“Truly the most progressive and forward-looking budget in our city’s history,” Lightfoot said.
Nodding to Chicago’s high violent crime, she said the city must be a place where people feel safe and that her spending will help address root causes of street violence, such as poverty.
Lightfoot drew big applause from invited guests as she praised her administration’s $500-a-month basic income program.
“My friends, this is a moment of pride for our city,” she said.
The mayor also described Chicago as a city mounting a comeback, noting a modest increase in Chicago’s credit rating and businesses moving into town. She also invoked former Mayor Harold Washington’s last budget in 1987, before he died, which she claimed as a spiritual budget.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I am overjoyed with humility, either reflection, but also with incredible pride,” Lightfoot said.
Still, her budget was not without opposition.
“Listening to some of the speeches today, I feel like Christmas has come early,” said Southwest Side Ald. Raymond Lopez, who derided the spending he said underpins a budget that’s “grossly out of balance.” The city should have tightened its belt, gotten rid of vacant employee positions and used the savings to give Chicagoans a tax break, Lopez said.
And he predicted a big jump in inflation will lead to an automatic property tax increase of around $100 million in 2023 that residents won’t be prepared for.
Southwest Side Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez said progressives “settled for a pittance” from the mayor rather than pushing harder to get the city to more fully fund affordable housing and other top goals.
Eight of the no votes came from white aldermen, many from wards with relatively high housing costs and property tax bills.
After the budget passed, Southwest Side Ald. Matt O’Shea told reporters he couldn’t support a property tax increase and the basic income program.
“In two years, we won’t be able to afford it,” O’Shea said.
Instead, the city should’ve been talking about measures such as child care to help get people back to work, he said.
“Just giving money out to people when there’s tens of thousands of jobs in our city right now, that’s not something I can support,” O’Shea said.
Ald. Roberto Maldonado balked at a property tax increase he said would accelerate the gentrification that’s pushing working-class families out of his ward, which includes the Humboldt Park neighborhood.
“Every little bit of property tax increase is another (cause) of my people being ... displaced from the ward,” Maldonado said.
City Council opponents of the mayor’s priorities also found other issues on which to plant their flags.
Progressive opposition hardened in recent days to a Lightfoot decision to use nearly $1 billion in federal money to cancel borrowing and pay back banks for loans the city took out when the economy cratered in the early months of the pandemic.
Northwest Side Ald. Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez, 33rd, told protesters outside City Hall Wednesday morning that she was tired of spending plans in which “always the banks end up winning; the banks end up hoarding the resources.”
The vote on a 2021 budget amendment to use federal funds to repay banks passed Wednesday by a narrower 31-19 tally.
