By the time Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s City Council floor leader stood to help him close the deal on passing a budget with steeper tax and fee increases than any other in Chicago history, 18 aldermen already had held forth about the difficulty of the vote.
After weeks of discussion, debate and flat-out complaining by some, Ald. Patrick O’Connor told his colleagues it finally was time for Chicago to face up to its woeful condition. O’Connor, an alderman since 1983, said decades of financial mismanagement had brought them to the point where approving a budget stacked with $755 million in new taxes and fees was the lone remaining option.
“Nobody wants to be told you’re sick, you need to take medicine. You need chemo. You need an operation. This is an equivalent of a municipal illness,” said O’Connor, 40th. “We don’t have an option of saying, ‘No.’ We have the option of picking our choices to stay alive.”
A short time later, 35 of the 50 aldermen voted to serve Chicagoans dose after dose of tax, fee and fine increases that will lighten their pockets for years to come with a declared promise of restoring the city’s financial health.
A record $543 million property tax to pay for police and fire pensions. An additional $45 million property tax hike for school construction. More than $62 million in new garbage pickup fees. Some $48 million in taxi and ride-share fare and fee hikes. Another $40 million in new taxes on streaming services and cloud businesses. An additional $13 million in more expensive building permit fees, $2 million to remove vehicle boots and $1 million in e-cigarette taxes.
Down the hatch it all went as Emanuel looked on. The mayor later applauded aldermen for “voting to put progress for the city ahead of their own individual politics, and I think that’s the highest thing of public service.”
Moments before the vote, Emanuel told aldermen from his perch above their desks that Chicago’s woeful financial condition had “hung over this city like a dark cloud, and those finances were beginning to erode people’s confidence in this city.”
A 2010 state law calling for major increases in city contributions to police and fire retirement funds forced his hand on the property tax increase after he avoided one at City Hall during his first four years in office. Similarly, the city’s credit rating taking a nosedive to junk status pushed Emanuel toward raising enough money in the budget to scale back costly, short-term borrowing practices and work to close its recurring budget shortfall.
But even before Emanuel won approval of all the new money he contended is needed to make those corrective actions possible, he offered aldermen a warning.
“Yes, it is not final. We have more work ahead of us,” he said of addressing the city’s financial problems. “But from 2011, are we closer to the other side of the shore to fixing our finances than before? I can answer affirmatively in my conscience, ‘We are better.'”
Getting better will have its price, particularly for Chicago property owners, who will take the biggest hit.
The $543 million property tax hike will take effect in a series of increases the next four years, and people who live in single-family homes, duplexes and three- and four-flats will pay a new $9.50-a-month per-unit fee for trash pickup. The additional CPS property tax increase will mean that, all told, the typical property tax bill will increase by about 13 percent over the next four years. For the owner of a home worth $250,000, that represents about a $554 annual increase. Commercial property owners will pay more.
Ald. Ed Burke, the longtime Finance Committee chairman who has been on the council since 1969, painted the vote on the tax increases and Emanuel’s budget as a choice between either doing the right thing for the city or acting out of political self-interest.
“It’s been said a politician looks at the next election, a statesman looks at the next generation,” Burke said. “Today the members of the body have a choice. They can look to the next election, or can look to the next generation.”
Some aldermen, though, argued Emanuel had not done enough to cut the budget before turning to taxpayers.
“We have departments that are growing in size,” said Ald. Harry Osterman, 48th. “I question are we doing everything in our power to shrink the size of government before we go and ask the homeowners to pay more, and I can’t say in good conscience that we have.”
In the end, Emanuel’s property tax increases and most of the other fees and fines passed the council by a 35-15 vote. The mayor’s spending plan won approval on a 36-14 tally.
The roll calls, however, did not totally track with Emanuel’s usual areas of support or the rhetoric from aldermen in the weeks before the votes.
During the month leading up to the budget vote, much of the loudest criticism came from African-American aldermen who blasted the trash pickup fee and held a news conference on the morning of the Police Department’s budget presentation to call for Emanuel to fire police Superintendent Garry McCarthy. But only two of the council’s 18 black aldermen — Jason Ervin, 28th, and Christopher Taliaferro, 29th — voted against the budget. Ald. David Moore, 17th, voted for the budget but against the tax hikes to pay for it on the grounds he could not support the trash fee.
And while the council’s Progressive Reform Caucus has staked out positions against Emanuel’s spending priorities and urged him to rely more on special taxing district funds and other alternative sources of revenue to balance the books, only four of the group’s 11 aldermen voted against the budget.
Meanwhile, six “no” votes came from white downtown and North Side aldermen not allied with the progressives, but representing areas where a property tax hike will have a bigger impact. Ald. Debra Silverstein, 50th, is normally a solid pro-Emanuel vote but said the tax hike is likely to hit hard in West Rogers Park.
And freshman Ald. Anthony Napolitano said the property tax hike was too much for his constituents to swallow, even though he’s a firefighter and the tax revenue would go toward firefighter pensions.
“I probably have less pressure, being stuck in a basement, not finding my way out of a fire, than going through this right now,” Napolitano, 41st, said of the budget. “Every week, hundreds of people would come into my office, call me or email me and state, ‘Anthony, we realize this is our pension, but don’t vote for it. This really hurts this neighborhood.'”
Three votes against came out of bungalow belt Northwest Side wards where the heavy concentration of single-family homes also make the dual hit of the tax increase and garbage fee a hard sell. Among them was freshman Ald. Gilbert Villegas, who said homeowners in his 36th Ward were concerned they’d get spanked by Emanuel’s budget.
“The way it was lump-summed, there were some things I could have supported,” Villegas said. “But the reality is when you put it all together as a leave-it-or-take-it, I decided my community is going to be impacted too much.”
For his part, Emanuel would not rule out more taxpayer pain in the future, even as he acknowledged he might be interested in running for a third term. The mayor stressed he went four years without turning to a property tax increase calling it “the last place I’m going to look.” Emanuel did, however, raise a whole host of other taxes and fees, and raised property taxes every year at Chicago Public Schools.
The mayor twice was asked how he’d solve the city’s other still-unresolved pension and financial problems and whether he could assure homeowners he wouldn’t raise their property taxes again. At one point, Emanuel replied, “I can’t stand here and tell you the next three years, so don’t take, tomorrow, my words out of context.
“Oh, it’s the old trick,” the mayor said of the question. “Anybody that would ever say what they’re going to do, I can’t.”
