The City Club of Chicago in the last few weeks has conducted a mayoral pageant of sorts, with four of the nine candidates crossing the stage since the beginning of the year.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot in her appearance last week concocted a sentence that morphed from the mundane to the mystical but still got its point across: “When we apply fiscal discipline, invest in ourselves and our people and our places, and we put ourselves in a stable financial footing, that’s where the magic happens,” she said.
Pensions and potions don’t typically mix, but there it was. Lightfoot is mixing her own elixir to fix the city’s fiscal health: paying down pensions to improve the city’s credit rating; using the INVEST South/West development strategy to revive overlooked neighborhoods; applying zero-base budgeting to cut costs; and reducing city debt by nearly $750 million.
Former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas offered his own elixir when it came his turn on the City Club stage — whether fantastic or fantastical, you be the judge. He called it a “second Burnham plan.”
Now, it’s cliché to conjure Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago as a metaphor for big thinking in Chicago. State Rep. Kambium “Kam” Buckner did it just days before, to his own City Club crowd.
But Vallas was different, in that he invoked Burnham chiefly to turn the urban planner’s vision on its head. Burnham reinvented Chicago’s downtown to fuel the growth of the entire metropolis. Vallas’ plan is to decentralize: a new municipal bank, a community development authority and “locally owned commercial enterprises,” all to drive capital to the farthest reaches of the city.
Cash generated from the new city casino, sports betting and tax increment financing districts would circulate to underinvested neighborhoods, particularly on the South and West sides. Decisions would be wrested from City Hall and delegated to the city-funded but independently run development authority.
That’s the big idea, but here’s the reality check. There are restrictions on how TIF and casino funds can be spent. And while public banks have been the talk of liberal elites for some time now — with proposals in the works in Los Angeles and San Francisco — even the liberal think tank Roosevelt Institute has warned that cronyism and corruption would be major concerns for any city-run bank.
Still, it’s good to see bold thinking. Chicago is in a fix and needs novel measures. The voters who go to the polls Feb. 28 will decide what makes sense and what might lead to decline or risk disaster.
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Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson wants to eliminate the city’s structural budget deficit and set aside $250 million more each year for schools, affordable housing and transit. So far, so good. He would do so by introducing a city income tax on people who make more than $100,000 a year. He’d tax commuters from the suburbs. He’d bring back a head tax on the employers who create jobs.
You name it, Johnson might tax it — in a city where the tax burden already is driving investment away. Good ideas? Bad ones? That’s why we have elections.
To this point, the issues of violent crime and public safety have dominated the campaign. That’s fitting, given that crime is making the streets unsafe, driving businesses out of town, wrecking Chicago’s reputation and giving rise to a generation of young people surrounded by despair.
But whomever gets elected will need more than a public safety strategy. They’ll need to balance budgets, encourage investment, educate people, protect public health and strengthen neighborhoods. And do all this, and more, while facing sharp reductions in federal COVID-19 spending that has helped balance budgets under Lightfoot.
If you wonder why Lightfoot hasn’t conjured simple fixes to the city’s economic problems, in the ways that Vallas, Buckner, Johnson and others are doing, it may be because she knows just how tough the job can be.
As a first-time candidate, Lightfoot had her own big ideas: a graduated real estate transfer tax; a new council of economic advisers; statewide pension reform; and hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenues from a new Chicago casino.
None came to pass, which is not to say Lightfoot’s economic plans have failed. Structural changes have cut $1.2 billion in costs and reduced overtime and workers’ compensation claims by nearly 30%, and the city is set to pay down debt on a $300 million to $400 million annual basis. Borrowing is cheaper due to budget management and improvement in the city’s balance sheet.
Given Lightfoot’s track record so far, “stay the course” was a reasonable message before the City Club last week. Whether it’s enough, up against flashier-sounding ideas from her opponents, we’ll soon learn.
In an interview I did with Lightfoot for the Better Government Association in 2019, she described her early days as mayor. “I feel like I sit in the eye of the storm, where I know there is a lot raging around me,” she said. “My goal is to always remain calm, and focused, so that we make rational decisions, not stuff that’s spur of the moment and reactive.”
And that was before COVID-19 hit. And the unrest following the murder of George Floyd.
Lightfoot has learned there’s no easy formula for running a city — no incantations that can make the troubles go away. And if a different candidate gets elected based on their big ideas, they, too, will learn just how tough it can be for Chicago’s mayor to make the magic happen.
David Greising is president and CEO of the Better Government Association.
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