Every year, Chicago officials approve a budget, dispensing billions of dollars into city services and programs. While it’s an annual event, this year’s budget season unfolds against a backdrop of historic events.
The COVID-19 pandemic has thrust the city into a nearly $800 million shortfall by the end of 2020 and an anticipated colossal $1.2 billion budget gap next year—which would be the largest in Chicago’s history. The budget process will determine how the city will attempt to increase revenue (potentially through taxes) and decrease expenses (by cutting city services and/or personnel) to balance its books, which means decisions made this fall could have an enormous impact on Chicagoans’ everyday lives.
Since March, Chicago has seen over 80,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases, hitting Black and Latinx communities the hardest, making any cuts to city services even more painful. In a city that sees more than 50 million visitors a year, the sudden slow-down in tourism and hospitality has shaken the economy and blown a hole in the tax revenues that the city anticipated this year and next. On top of that, Chicago activists and protesters have joined the nationwide outcry to defund the police. Summer uprisings in the city, sparked by the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and stoked by a long history of local police accountability activism, have put pressure on elected officials to divest from the Chicago Police Department’s close to two billion-dollar budget and instead reinvest in community services and care.
With Mayor Lori Lightfoot set to unveil her 2021 budget on Oct. 21 along with her plan to fill a $1.2 billion deficit, City Bureau presents a guide to what’s going on with the budget process this year and how residents can participate in the conversation.