ONE OF THE MAJOR TASKS OF THE INTERNSHIP IS FACT CHECKING. THERE ARE
NUMEROUS FACTUAL ERRORS IN THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE. CATCH AS MANY AS
YOU CAN AND CORRECT THEM IN RED. ALL OF THE INFORMATION NEEDED FOR
THIS FACT CHECKING TEST IS AVAILABLE ONLINE. CHECK NUMBERS, NAME
SPELLINGS, JOB TITLES, AND QUOTES (ALL QUOTES FROM ALDERMEN ARE
AVAILABLE ONLINE.) THERE ARE ALSO A FEW TYPOS. THOSE ARE GOOD FOR EXTRA
CREDIT.
WHAT THE 2014 BUDGET MEANS FOR THE SOUTH
SIDE
LOCAL ALDERMEN GRAPPLE WITH REGRESSIVE TAXES, HIRING FREEZES
IN THE LATEST BUDGET
BY PATRICK LEOW
“Let us remember how far we’ve come,” Mayor Emanuel thundered during his unveiling of the 2014
budget on October 22nd. He beamed with obvious warmth at the aldermen collected beneath him as he
informed them that he had once again managed to shrink a yawning budget deficit without raising property
or income taxes.
Miniaturization was the watchword of this entire budget. Even though it has been half a decade since the
Great Depression began, the holy grail of fiscal austerity and shrunken government as a means to stave off
economic crises remains alive and kicking. Mayor Emanuel, decked out in a bright red tie, lavished praise
on his administration’s ability to cut “the wasteful and duplicative policies of the past.” It was an obsession
with size that permeated the entirety of his address.
His commitment to shrunken deficits is more than empty rhetoric, and his administration’s weight-loss
regime has borne fruit for him and his budget director Alexandra Holt. The structural deficit is set to be
slashed to $339 million for 2015, a drastic change from the $790 million that was projected three years ago.
Underpinning this headline number is a coherent ideology, where his ideal government is, as he describes,
“smaller, simpler, and stronger.”
To achieve this slimmer budget deficit, his government will institute a series of relatively minor tax hikes
in 2014. Notably, Chicago’s smokers will be placed under greater strain, with a ten percent increase in the
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city tax levied per pack of cigarettes, garnering the city $1.43 per pack of eighteen. The Emanuel
administration projects that this increase will raise $10 million, the majority of which would be funneled
towards providing Medicare coverage for the more than fifty-thousand CPS students who rely upon it for
their healthcare.
While aldermen were quick to paint this as a positive step for both public health and public coffers, some of
those who represent South Side constituencies worried that this tax increase would have the unintended
consequence of sparking more violence on their streets. Alderman Leslie Hareston of the 6th Ward was
especially vehement in her denunciation of the “disproportionate impact” that an increased cigarette tax
would have in communities of color.
“This will have the impact of creating a very large black market in a lot of minority neighborhoods,” she
said. “The loose sale of single cigarettes increases loitering, and people involved in illegal activities will
loiter more on the streets. That’s a gang problem that arises from that increased visibility.”
Alderman Rodrick Sawyer of the 6th Ward echoed Alderman Hairston’s caution over the cigarette tax, but
took pains to not inject race into the debate. “I’m not talking about race, I’m talking about lower-income
people in general. This is hitting the poorest, the hardest,” he said.
Instead, he called upon the mayor to find a more equitable way to raise revenues. “I want to make sure that
the burden is spread across all income tax levels,” he said, decrying the cigarette tax as a way to plug the
city’s deficit. “This is a regressive tax.”
Still, racial inequalities came to the forefront during debate over the mayors push to reduce personal
numbers in numerous city departments, with 1,500 city positions having already been eliminated in his first
three years in office. The 34th Ward’s Alderman Carrie Austen, chairman of the Budget Committee, is a
prominent critic of removing well-paying middle-class jobs from low-income neighborhoods like hers,
noting in a recent interview that deficit reduction cannot be built upon “the backs of people who are adding
to our economy.”
Stagnant or even declining numbers of city jobs exacerbate existing problems in unequal hiring practices in
many public departments. During a hearing on November 7, Thomas Powers, head of the city’s Water
Management Department, came under particular scrutiny from members of the council’s Black Caucus for
the department’s stark racial imbalance. Only six percent of its 1,511 salaried employees are black, well
shy of the 32.9 percent black share of the entire state’s population.
However, Powers declined to commit to any concrete steps to make his department more
representative. He directed the debate toward purely procedural grounds, insisting that all employment
decisions made by the department were constrained by a definite, but unexplained, hiring process.
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The department is no stranger to suspicion from black aldermen. Late in 2012, Mayor Emanuel decided to
lay off thirty-four Water Management workers and outsource their jobs to call center contractors employed
by Japanese firm TNT Data. Most of the thirty-four happened to be black Chicagoans hailing from the
South and West sides, a fact that raised the ire of Alderman Sawyer, who complained last year that laying
off city workers from neighborhoods that were especially reliant upon government jobs had a huge negative
effect. “If you fire [city workers], there’s a ripple effect,” he told an audience at a South Shore budget
meeting. “Businesses get hurt. Families get hurt.”
Given that the water department is the third-largest department in the entire city, the vagueness surrounding
its racial inequities worries many. And there’s no upcoming sign of a great change: the mayor’s budget will
have the water department slash seven positions in 2014, a downsizing that is replicated in almost every
city wide department. This will likely have the effect of locking in the existing racial proportion of city
workers in departments like Water Management, maintaining the imbalance until city cofers recover their
vitality once again.
Such a prospect seems extremely remote. On some days during these two weeks of budget debates, it felt as
if lawmakers could speak of nothing but the statewide pension crisis that will descend upon the city in
2015. Then, Chicago will be required by state statute to pay $600 billion to fill police and fire pension
coffers that are currently teetering on the edge of insolvency.
Mayor Emanuel described the effect this expenditure would have in apocalyptic terms. “Without balanced
reform, meeting our current pension obligations would require us to nearly double the city’s property tax, a
move that would send residents and businesses streaming out of Chicago,” he said.
If things remain as they currently are, the pension crisis will have the effect of increasing the city’s deficit
beyond $1 billion in 2016, potentially undercutting the significance of the cuts Emanuel has made during
his time in office.
Chicago’s 2014 budget is a transitory one, and the city is collectively holding its breath to see if Mayor
Emanuel’s dire promise of a Chicago that is drained of its middle-class residents will materialize if
Springfield fails to reform an underfunded pension system.
All the same, the minor tweaks to both spending and taxation that Mayor Emanuel has put in place for this
year do not encourage optimism that this budget is one that will benefit residents of the South Side. The
debate, as argued, is now about how cuts should happen, rather than whether a smaller city government is
justified in the first place—comfortable ground for Mayor Emmanuel.
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