Mayor Brandon Johnson speaks at a news conference on Wednesday, Aug. 2, 2023. (WTTW News)

Mayor Brandon Johnson is set to unveil his first spending plan on Wednesday while under intense pressure not only to close the $538 million gap in the city’s 2024 budget, but also to make good on promises to invest in working-class Chicagoans and reshape the city’s approach to public safety.

Johnson has already answered the biggest question that usually faces mayors as they step to the rostrum in the City Council chambers to unveil their budget plan by vowing to “hold the line” against any increase in the property tax levy when he detailed the deficit nearly a month ago.

But the spending plan crafted by Johnson and his team will provide the most comprehensive response to the myriad of intractable problems facing the mayor, including how to handle the more than 1,700 vacant positions in the Chicago Police Department, since he took office nearly 150 days ago.

Johnson has worked for weeks to tamp down the sky-high expectations of the progressive political organizations that fueled his come-from-behind victory, vanquishing not just former Mayor Lori Lightfoot but also former CPS CEO Paul Vallas, by emphasizing the scale and complexity of the problems facing Chicago.

“Trying to solve all of the systemic errors that have taken place over the course of a generation in one budget? Not even my Aunt Minnie expects me to work that miracle and she has high expectations for her nephew,” Johnson told reporters on Sept. 27, deploying the charm and humor that have marked many of his interactions with the news media in his first months in office. “If my Aunt Minnie can be patient with one budget, moving us in the right direction, I’m confident that the rest of the people of Chicago recognize that we have multiple budgets to bring people together.”

As the end-of-the-year deadline for the Chicago City Council to approve a budget for 2024 looms, Johnson vowed to approach the often-tense debate over the city’s finances in a different manner than his predecessors, who often determined how taxpayer money would be spent with little input from residents or alderpeople.

“Getting things done doesn’t require you to be a dictator or harmful,” Johnson said.

That kind of governance led to closure of 50 Chicago Public Schools, six public mental health clinics and the erosion of public housing, Johnson said.

“You are not going to undo the type of trauma that has been executed against the people of Chicago in one budget,” Johnson said.

The City Council vote on Oct. 4 to create a working group is expected to relieve some of the burden confronting Johnson to immediately fulfill promises to reopen public mental health clinics and expand efforts to respond to 911 calls not with police officers but with social workers and counselors, the heart of the proposal known as “Treatment Not Trauma.”

“We have a working group that is going to come up with recommendations because that’s what I do as mayor: I collaborate, I listen and then move us forward,” Johnson said after that unanimous vote.

Spotlight on Police Budget

One of the biggest questions confronting Johnson centers on the budget for the 14,093-position Chicago Police Department, which had a budget in 2023 of $1.94 billion.

To defeat Vallas, Johnson withstood a tidal wave of attacks claiming he wanted to defund the police. Johnson rejected those claims, and promised to unite Chicagoans around a public safety plan that takes a new approach to the surge of crime and violence that began during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and has yet to fully recede. Even as shootings and murders have declined, robberies and thefts have surged in recent weeks.

As the race entered the homestretch, Johnson vowed not to cut the police department by even “one penny” and promised to redirect $150 million within the police department’s budget while expanding the number of detectives by nearly 200 officers.

The actual size of the Chicago Police Department has been essentially unchanged since July 2022, after an exodus of officers triggered by the pandemic, city data shows. The Chicago data portal listed 12,363 active employees of the Police Department as of Monday, which means 87.7% of all budgeted positions are filled.

That means the staffing crunch confronting police brass in Chicago, and across the country, is likely to persist, Johnson said, giving him and newly confirmed Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling a chance to transform CPD into an agency better prepared to implement the more “holistic” approach to public safety that focuses on the “root causes” of crime, as the mayor promised during the campaign.

“With this budget, and the vacancies in particular, we have an opportunity to imagine how our police departments can ultimately meet the expectations of this moment,” Johnson said, adding that he has charged Snelling with creating a police department prepared for the 21st century.

The way the Chicago Police Department is structured, and has been structured for decades, is “not the pathway moving forward,” Johnson said.

In his first City Hall news conference, Snelling acknowledged the department was “short officers,” which has forced CPD to rely on overtime worked by officers. Chicago taxpayers spent $126.5 million on overtime for members of the Chicago Police Department during the first six months of 2023 — nearly 50% more than during the same period in 2022,

Snelling has vowed to ensure that every dollar spent by CPD translates into a return for taxpayers, and said his first priority was to assess how officers are deployed and make necessary adjustments.

An analysis of CPD’s 2023 budget by the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability could provide Snelling with a road map. The commission found that the department’s budget was not spent “effectively or equitably” because it lacked “a long-term, data-driven strategy to reduce violence.”

The commission also urged police officials to implement new measures to link lawsuit settlements or verdicts — which can run into the millions of dollars — to specific complaints of misconduct and analyze what happened in an effort to prevent similar cases by disciplining officers, retraining them or offering them counseling or other treatment.

Eliminating the bulk of the department’s vacancies could take a chunk out of the city’s 2024 budget deficit – while opening Johnson up to criticism that he did, in fact, move to defund the police once in office.

Lightfoot faced similar criticism for proposing a budget in August 2020, amid the economic collapse triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, that eliminated 618 vacant CPD positions and reduced the department’s 2021 budget by 3.3% to $1.69 billion.

The authorized size of the department has not changed since the 2021 fiscal year, even as police spending grew nearly 15% in the next two years, mostly to cover the cost of contractually required raises for the department’s rank and file officers.

Deficit Swollen by Migrant Crisis, Pension Costs

More than a third of the projected 2024 budget deficit, or about $200 million, is due to the rising cost of caring for migrants sent to Chicago from the southern border. In all, more than 17,000 people have been sent to Chicago after entering the country legally after requesting asylum.

More than 3,200 men, women and children are now living at police stations across the city and at O’Hare and Midway Airports, officials said, with another 10,200 people living in city shelters, according to city data.

An anticipated surplus from the city’s Tax Increment Financing Districts will offset some of the deficit, and Johnson vowed in September to close the rest with “expenditure reviews, revenue enhancement measures and potential reallocation of resources.”

Chicago’s financial picture has been buoyed in recent years by the city’s red-hot real estate market, a faster than anticipated recovery from the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic and nearly $2 billion in federal aid designed to help the city withstand the ravages of the economic catastrophe that the pandemic triggered. Chicago ended 2022 with a surplus of $307.3 million, according to the city’s annual financial report.

However, that post-pandemic boom appears to have cooled significantly, in part because of the fast rate of inflation and efforts by federal banking officials to combat that surge by raising interest rates. Chicago has seen “uneven economic growth through the first six months of 2023,” according to the city’s official budget forecast.

Chicago’s 2024 spending plan is the first that will reflect gambling revenues from a casino, with a temporary gaming palace now open at Medinah Temple.

The city’s finances will continue to be pinched by soaring pension payments, as the city complies with a state law that requires two of Chicago’s funds be funded at a 90% level by 2055 and the other two by 2058, ensuring they can pay benefits to employees as they retire.

In 2024, state law requires Chicago to pay more than $2.41 billion to its pension funds. Johnson also proposed making an additional payment to the city’s four pension funds of $306.6 million, following a policy put in place by Lightfoot, to prevent “further growth of the city’s unfunded pension liabilities,” according to the forecast released by the Johnson administration.

The city’s projected budget deficit in 2024 is also being fueled by a $214.4 million increase in salaries, wages and benefits due to the city’s unionized employees, according to the forecast.

Contact Heather Cherone:@HeatherCherone| (773) 569-1863 |[email protected]