Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Monday that he’ll use an expected haul of $8.5 million from “deadbeats and cheaters” who owe City Hall money to pay for more police and summer programs for children.
Chicago has collected $5.2 million in outstanding debt in about three weeks using an ordinance that allows the city to intercept state income tax refunds from people across Illinois.
The city estimates it will get $3.3 million more in outstanding debt during this tax season. The individuals and businesses being forced to pay up got final notices for debt owed on parking tickets, red-light citations or administrative hearing fines that date to 2005.
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“I cannot have a system that tilts toward deadbeats and cheaters,” Emanuel said at a news conference at Harris Park on the South Side. “The first set of resources have come in, and we are now going to make the choice to invest in our children.”
Emanuel is dedicating the money to what he called a “safety surplus” that will allow the city to spend more on summer programs, jobs and internships for Chicago youths.
The city’s Summer Youth Employment Program and After School Matters’ summer apprentice and internship program will get $2 million each. An additional $2.5 million will help the Park District increase the slots available for high-demand summer programs, including day camp, soccer, and video and digital art classes.
Emanuel also said he plans to use $2 million to add 50 cadets to the June police academy class. That would bring the total to 150 new officers this year.
Mike Shields, president of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, noted that the increase still fails to keep pace with attrition at the Police Department. And it doesn’t make up for the more than 1,300 vacant police positions Emanuel took off the books in the 2012 budget, Shields said.
“Thirteen hundred vacancies were eliminated by a single stroke of the budget director’s pencil. They balanced the budget at the expense of public safety in that move,” Shields said. “To budget only 100 officers, and now today 150, does not keep pace with the nearly 1,100 sworn officer retirements that the city has seen in the last two years.”
Shields also questioned the cost of training an additional 50 officers, noting that last summer, Emanuel and Chicago Transit Authority President Forrest Claypool said they were using $10 million to hire 50 full-time police officers to patrol the rail and bus system. The police recruits training for the CTA started the academy in the fall and are expected to be detailed in spring.
The cash-infusion from scofflaws is a one-time windfall. Police officers, in contrast, will be a recurring expense once they are on the city payroll. Asked if the surplus was something he could depend on year after year, Emanuel said, “I’m not going to talk about next year. We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”
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