On October 15, Mayor Richard M. Daley held a press conference to break some bad news: To erase a $500 million budget deficit for next year, he would probably have to eliminate jobs, cut services, and dip into reserve funds generated by leasing the Skyway and the parking meters.
But behind the scenes, the mayor and his chief aides were proposing to spend millions of taxpayer dollars on a rehab of Willis Tower, subsidies for privately run hospitals and Fortune 500 corporations, and pet neighborhood projects that won’t be included in the official city budget.
We recently came into possession of hard evidence of what we’ve long argued: that the city produces two annual budgets, one released to the public, covered by the media, and debated by the City Council, and the other forged behind closed doors by the Daley administration, shared only in pieces with certain aldermen, and never fully disclosed to citizens. Both budgets are funded by taxpayers.
If Daley’s regime is undone by journalists, Ben Joravsky and Mick Dumke will be holding the ends of the string.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised:
By moving more necessary expenditures into the secret budget that he ultimately controls, the mayor also wields even more power over every public entity, from the City Council to the public schools to the Park District. At various times at least half a dozen aldermen have told us that mayoral aides pressure them on key votes—such as the ordinances for funding the Olympics or moving the Children’s Museum to Grant Park—by either promising to give their wards more TIF dollars or threatening to take TIF dollars away.
Some aldermen say many of their colleagues don’t grasp how the program works and simply agree to everything proposed by the administration. Others say they’ve had to figure out how to get what they need out of the program. Burnett says he learned his lesson about eight years ago, when the city used TIF money to put up ornamental lights along Chicago and Madison without consulting him first. “I’d just told other parts of my community we didn’t have money for lights, then I saw the new lights and said, ‘Where did that money come from?’”
Burnett says he raised a stink, and now things are different: “I think I’m fully part of the process—if I pay attention.”
