+ Investments

The FY 2024 Budget includes new investments in a number of priority issues for 47th Ward residents, including public safety, the environment, and sanitation.

Public Safety

The FY 2024 budget includes 14,137 positions for the Chicago Police Department—the same personnel count as in the FY 2023 budget. (Similarly, the Fire Department will see essentially the same number of positions in 2024—5,148, as compared with 5,145 in 2023.) One notable change for CPD involves the Bureau of Detectives. Specifically, the Bureau will receive over 100 new detective positions in 2024, which when filled will help reduce the caseloads for individual detectives.

Also notable is the fact that there continues to be a significant number of vacancies in sworn officers—over 1,500 vacant positions as 2023 comes to a close. And while the pace of hiring has started to consistently outpace attrition for the first time since the start of the pandemic, the Department is unlikely to fill most or all of the positions quickly. Accordingly, CPD will use these vacancies to hire an additional 400 civilians who will fill roles that previously were performed by sworn officers.

As in prior years, I remain concerned with the veracity of CPD’s overtime budget. In every year I have served in office, CPD has exceeded its overtime budget—ranging from a $38 million overage in 2019 to a $92 million overage in 2022. And in the first six months of 2023, CPD spent $126.5 million on overtime, despite having an overtime budget of $100 million for the entire year. As with 2023, the FY 2024 budget sets aside only $100 million for police overtime. With the Democratic National Convention coming to Chicago in August, keeping overtime as close to the budgeted amount as possible will be as difficult as ever.

I am heartened to see that in 2024, funding for youth jobs will increase by $11 million to a total of $78 million, as organizations like After School Matters provide invaluable support to young people through hands-on mentoring and resource-rich opportunities. Similarly, the FY 2024 budget includes $5 million to help support Chicagoans returning from jail or prison with housing and job assistance.

I am, however, disappointed that the FY 2024 budget does not include additional year-over-year funding for community violence intervention and domestic violence supports. In recent studies, both Northwestern University and the University of Chicago Crime Lab have concluded that violence prevention organizations including Chicago CRED and READI Chicago have helped reduce gun violence in multiple Chicago neighborhoods through a mix of therapy, paid job training, and hands-on job placement. Given this success, it remains crucial that City government aggressively scale its support of violence prevention organizations so as to match the scope of the challenges that Chicago continues to face with shootings.

Similarly, I hope that future budgets will include most resources for organizations that support victims of domestic and gender-based violence. In the first six months of 2023, over 450 families fleeing domestic violence were turned away from emergency shelter in Chicago, and, as of October 2023, approximately 340 families were on the domestic violence rapid rehousing waiting list. With calls to the Illinois Domestic Violence Hotline continuing to increase, City government can and must do more to help victims in need.

Finally, I would like to thank the Community Commission on Public Safety for their hard work in their inaugural year of existence. In just a few short months, they led a widely lauded, community-driven process to select a new CPD Superintendent, and published their own feedback and recommendations on CPD’s FY 2024 budget. I look forward to continuing to work with them in the coming years.

Public Health

In 2011, City leaders closed six of Chicago’s 12 mental health clinics, supposedly for budget reasons. As a result, thousands of Chicagoans have found it difficult to access mental healthcare, and many of those who had sought care at the shuttered health clinics lost their providers.

In addition to public mental health clinics, recent discourse regarding City supports for Chicagoans in need of mental health resources has focused on 911 calls involving individuals experiencing a non-violent mental health emergency. The 19th Police District—which is the most populous district in Chicago and covers all of the 47th Ward south of Lawrence—receives the second most mental health-related calls of any police district in the city. In recent years, CPD officers have received more frequent and robust crisis intervention training, but we need to do more.

In 2022, Chicago took a big step in the right direction by establishing the Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement (CARE) Team—a pilot program through which paramedics, crisis workers, and (sometimes) crisis intervention-trained officers responded to non-violent mental health-related 911 calls. Notably, this team has not used force during any of their interventions to date.

Recently, City Council established a working group to make recommendations on the most efficient way to implement Treatment Not Trauma, a proposal to reopen our shuttered public clinics and to expand the alternative crisis-response model. In the meantime, the FY 2024 budget aims to make progress by reopening two public mental health clinics and adding 40 new positions to our CARE teams.

Environmental Protection and Sustainability

With the encouragement and support of the 47th Ward Green Council, I passed a resolution in 2020 declaring a climate emergency in Chicago. However, the efficacy of this declaration and the 2022 Climate Action Plan that followed rests, in part, on having a well-resourced group of leaders and experts who can put the ambitious goals laid out in these documents into action.

In 2011, after the City disbanded its Department of Environment, environmental enforcement dropped significantly. Environmental justice disasters, like the Hilco implosion in Little Village and the opening of General Iron in South Chicago, have made it clear that the status quo does not work for Chicagoans. And while the FY 2023 budget included several new positions in the Mayor’s Office of Climate Equity and Sustainability, it punted the issue of whether and how to re-establish the Department. I am delighted that the FY 2024 budget includes an unequivocal commitment to re-establish the Department of Environment. Along with becoming a full Department and hiring new positions, the budget requires the crafting and release of recommendations on how to expand the Department of Environment quickly and robustly. Indeed, a number of other departments including the Department of Public Health and the Department of Buildings currently contain positions that would be an ideal fit for a reinvigorated Department of Environment.

The FY 2024 budget also funds the establishment of 15 composting drop-off sites across Chicago, including one near the 47th Ward at 5333 N. Western Ave. Currently, Chicago diverts roughly 9% of its waste from landfills through recycling and other means—a far cry from other peer cities.

Improved composting lies at the core of the sustainable city we all want. That’s why, in the FY 2022 budget, I helped secure funding for six neighborhood garden composting pilots, one of which is in the 47th Ward at Montrose Metra Community Gardens. These initial pilots, along with the 15 regional drop-off sites, demonstrate neighbors’ robust appetite for public composting options. And in the coming years, I look forward to working with the Department of Streets & Sanitation and the US EPA to stand up a curbside composting program from which all Chicagoans can benefit.

Other City Services

This budget also includes meaningful investments in City services that residents rely on, including tree trimming and rodent abatement. In Spring 2023, the Bureau of Forestry switched from a request-based tree trimming program to a grid-based program. The results have been encouraging. At this point in 2022, Forestry had trimmed nearly 370 trees in the 47th Ward. To date in 2023, Forestry has trimmed approximately 1165 trees—a nearly 350% increase. The FY 2024 budget expands Forestry services further by hiring seven new tree trimmers and two new supervisors, which will increase the speed at which Forestry navigates the grid system.

In addition, recent reporting by the Better Government Association and others found that Chicagoans have filed over 50,000 rodent complaints in the past year, one of the highest on record. In the 47th Ward alone over the past year, there have been 1,444 requests for rodent abatement.To combat this issue, this budget hires an additional three new rat control crews, three new vehicles, and 83,000 new black carts.

It is vital that City government responds quickly and completely to service requests, regardless of how major or minor they may seem. I believe that these and other investments in the FY 2024 budget will help improve service speed and reliability for residents in the 47th Ward.

Finally, the FY 2024 budget includes $150 million set aside for food, housing, and other services relating to asylum seekers. To date, over 20,000 individuals have been bussed and flown to Chicago, with the vast majority of new arrivals coming from Central and South America. This is a crisis that is not of the City’s making, and that requires a level of federal assistance beyond what has been provided to date. I hope that federal leaders step up with more robust financial and process-related support—particularly with regard to temporary work authorization.

+ Revenue and Savings

TIF Surplus

The FY 2024 budget includes the largest tax-increment financing (TIF) surplus in recent history—$434 million. A TIF collects all property taxes from the properties in an area declared to be “blighted” so that they can be used to improve that area. When a TIF district is set up, the amount of property taxes that taxing bodies (City of Chicago, CPS, Cook County, etc.) receive is frozen; as property values rise, any taxes above that level instead collect within the TIF to be spent on projects in the district. In surplusing TIF funds, the City returns unallocated collected tax dollars from TIF districts to the taxing authorities that would have otherwise collected them, with over half of these funds going to Chicago Public Schools.

Over the last decade, the City has increasingly relied on TIF surplus to help close budget deficits. In 2015, for example, the City surplused $84 million in unallocated TIF funds, compared with $176 million in 2019, $304 million in 2021, and $395 million in 2023. But while TIF surplusing, when viewed in isolation, is often a fiscally responsible decision in a particular year, we must remain cognizant that it is not a long-term solution to addressing Chicago’s structural deficit. In the coming years, it remains vital that the City identify and adopt non-regressive structural solutions that keep Chicago on the path to solvency.

Savings and Efficiencies

The FY 2024 budget includes a number of savings through operational efficiencies in City government. By civilianizing 400 positions within the Chicago Police Department, the City anticipates saving approximately $113 million. The Administration has also identified $42M in savings in employee healthcare costs that have been overallocated for in previous years.

This budget also includes a $307 million supplemental pension payment. This payment will allow the City’s various pension funds to meet their current obligations to retirees without selling off assets at a loss amidst volatile market conditions.

Finally, as a result of recent upgrades in its bond rating, the City anticipates saving approximately $89 million through bond refinancing.

Other Revenue Options

While I commend the Mayor’s Office for identifying ways to close the projected $538 million deficit in 2024 without raising revenue in a regressive manner, there are a number of alternative revenue options that I hope the City will consider in the coming years—particularly given the looming expiration of one-time federal Covid relief funds, and recognizing that the State will need to play a role in supporting the City’s work here.

These include increasing Chicago’s share of the local government distributive fund. The City of Chicago does not administer an income tax. Rather, the State of Illinois collects a flat income tax and allocates a portion of that revenue to municipalities including Chicago. While this would require assistance from our partners in Springfield, it is possible for Illinois to increase the share of the income tax that they direct to municipalities.

In addition, the City could consider asking certain non-profit organizations to make a payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT). A number of other cities ask large non-profits such as hospitals and universities to contribute a portion of what they would have paid in property taxes if they did not have their tax-exempt status as non-profits. Some of these cities allow some of this contribution to be provided as in-kind community benefits.

+ Moving Forward

Chicago has faced serious challenges over the past several years. In addition to Covid, the City has endured a structural deficit, growing housing instability, and increased rates of robberies, burglaries, thefts, and domestic violence. And a key source of funding that the City has relied on to fund responses to these and other issues—federal Covid-relief support—is set to expire at the end of 2026.

These federally funded efforts have helped provide residents across Chicago with healthcare, safety, and security. Moving forward, it will be vital for City leaders to identify and adopt sustained revenue streams to fund these important programs, while eschewing the regressive fines and fees that hurt middle- and working-class people the most.

I look forward to working with my aldermanic colleagues and the Mayor’s Office in the coming years to build off of the work in this budget. Specifically, I look forward to reviewing and, where appropriate, adopting recommendations for how to better resource our new Department of Environment. Additionally, the Treatment Not Trauma working group passed by City Council earlier this year will provide recommendations to the full Council in early June 2024, which I anticipate will provide us with a public health roadmap moving forward.

+ New revenue, savings, and efficiencies

• $434 million TIF surplus, which is the largest in recent history, which includes $100 million to the City’s Corporate Fund
• $321 million in additional revenue, primarily from improved revenue projections, the FY 2023 surplus being carried over, and improved revenue enforcement
• $113 million in operational efficiencies, including civilianizing 400 CPD positions
• $89 million in bond refinancing based upon upgraded credit ratings for the City
• $42 million in personnel savings based on past overestimation of healthcare costs for City employees

+ Substantial new investments

• $11 million more for youth jobs ($78 million total)
• $5 million for the Office of Reentry to assist those returning from prison or jail
• $4 million for 31 new positions in the CARE Team and 40 new positions in public mental health clinics
• $1.8 million for the Department of Environment
• $1.4 million for the Office of Labor Standards
• $500,000 for new black carts
• $150 million for housing, food, and other services relating to asylum seekers