Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, a place of oppression, famine and plague. Moses had the Red Sea, which was willing to part at his behest. But he did not have $1.9 billion in federal cash to smooth his journey
Behold the central, best-of-times, worst-of-times paradox of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s 2021 address announcing a $16 billion budget for Chicago.
On one hand, the city is in a mess, mostly (but by no means entirely) due to factors outside direct City Hall control. On the other, federal American Recovery Plan goodies can be spread around to ease the pain and purchase support from progressive aldermen.
In one rhetorical moment in her speech, the mayor involved the Old Testament prophet and compared the pandemic travails of her city to the struggles of those ancient peoples; travails, she said, that require much government intervention in a many-headed hydra of programs designed to help a citizenry in crisis.
Moses became cover for spending federal cash. Daniel Burnham, he of “no small plans” fame, was thrown in there too. No small plans mean no small amount of spending.
In fairness to Lightfoot, who picked a near-impossible time to run a big, sprawling city, there is some poetry in the sudden abundance of resources at her disposal. A year ago, that would have beyond her wildest dreams.
And we admire the notes of restraint in the budget, while urging the mayor to withstand any and all subsequent pressure to remove them and empty the city’s federally guaranteed checking account on immediate gratification.
All good parents teach their kids not to spend their allowance all at once. And some suggest adding some improved earned income into the mix.
So Lightfoot is correct to hold the city to $782 million in ARP spending in 2021, leaving $385 million to plug a projected revenue hole in 2022 and $152 million of it for the year beyond. It is, at this juncture, impossible to confidently predict the endgame of the slippery pandemic. That necessitates caution.
Revenue projections are, far more than Lightfoot addressed, directly linked to public safety issues in a city wracked by so much horrific gun violence that closing down one of the city’s major freeways (as happened late Saturday on the Dan Ryan Expressway) to investigate a shooting has become a routine practice.
Anyone who saw a weary column of police officers, flashlights down, searching for bullets on the asphalt, couldn’t help but worry about the future of this city. And anyone who lives elsewhere would surely plan on a different route in the future.
Police have to be part of the solution to Chicago’s inestimably catastrophic gun violence, flawed as we have seen them to be. Thus we applaud the increase in police funding by about another $200 million, while suspecting that it may well not be enough. And we cheer some new attention to those whose lives have been destroyed by crime. “Victims don’t have anyone advocating for them,” Lightfoot said in a Monday visit with the Tribune Editorial Board.
Amen to that. And we hope State’s Attorney Kim Foxx is listening.
The hike in the city’s portion of property taxes is, by recent standards, modest. But it is not nonexistent and it puts further pressure on property owners, and further motivation to leave the city. Many middle-class homeowners will wonder why they are paying more, even as their federal contributions flow to the city with the largesse driven by the Biden administration. There is an element of double jeopardy, especially given the absence, as yet, of federal relief for state and local taxes paid.
Some programs announced by Lightfoot are sorely needed. Only a fool sees the police, or arresting criminals, as the entire solution to gun violence. There has to be a plan to intervene before crimes are committed and, especially, to pay attention to what is transpiring when people are released from prison back into this city’s neighborhoods, often after not long at all. The numbers of convicted criminals being monitored electronically in their own communities ballooned during the pandemic as jails were emptied, Lightfoot told the board. The effects have not been good. Resources are needed there.
We were also glad to see the police included in the provisions to mitigate the mental trauma of living and working in a city where there is much to keep anyone awake at night. We know the mayor feels this deeply and personally, and that is among her most admirable qualities. We don’t doubt her passionate desire to keep us all safe.
Similarly, there is no question that the pandemic torpedoed the performing arts, forcing closures of venues and massive unemployment of artists. Chicago’s arts scene is an educational source for youth, a massive generator of revenue and one of the key reasons many say they choose to live here. The support is welcome and deserved, at least to get that particular community back to where they were before the city and state said they could no longer open for business.
We’d like to see more support for conventions and other tourism in the budget, building on what our eyes show us is a slow and necessary recovery. At present, other cities are eclipsing Chicago when it comes to the pushing of a comeback. With the federal authorities announcing Monday an end to the travel ban for many vaccinated international visitors, this sector requires some visionary thinking. We haven’t seen much of that yet in Chicago, which tends to get trapped in present crises.
For example, Chicago has yet to get its airport people mover back in business after hundreds of millions of dollars and, for weary travelers, a long, hard spell in the shuttle-bus wilderness.
That failure is a symbol of how the Lightfoot administration also has to press for accountability. It must persuade Chicagoans that the federal money — and let’s not forget, that’s our money too — is being spent on programs that will be cost-effective and, above all, make this a safer and more prosperous city where individuals and organization clamor to live, visit and do business.
One more thing. At one point in her speech, Lightfoot said that parts of her city looked like scenes from “The Walking Dead,” there being so many drugged-out citizens on view. That’s true and she is right to use resources at her disposal to try to fix that issue.
But right before she started speaking, Chicagoans viewing the City Council meeting listened to alderman after alderman vying to get a piece of the ever-growing marijuana dispensary pie for their communities, using, and in some cases twisting, whatever social-equity arguments were at their disposal. It was a seedy cash fight, and there was no rhetoric about the social cost of all these ballooning retail pot operations to the communities in which they reside.
Better to proceed with great caution than to create a problem that will need federal money to be spent on a program, especially once the American Recovery Plan is a relic of history.
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