Relief money helping prop up Chicago’s 2022 budget

Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s 2022 spending plan is upon us, with a heap of federal COVID-19 recovery money and a property tax increase propping up what she proclaimed “the most progressive and forward-looking budget in our city’s history.”

While one alderman thinks Lightfoot “has the luck of the Irish on her side,” it remains to be seen whether her ambitious plan is sustainable, and if so, at what financial and political cost. Faced with yawning pandemic-related holes in the city’s revenue, Lightfoot opted to use part of the $1.9 billion Chicago got from the feds to pay back a $465 million pandemic bank loan, while also increasing funding for programs favored by activists such as mental health services, affordable housing and anti-violence efforts. And she created a $31 million program set to start in 2022 to pay 5,000 low-income families $500 per month for a year.

The $16.7 billion overall budget includes a relatively modest $76.5 million property tax bump, making it an easy package for many aldermen to support. It passed the City Council by a comfortable 35-15 margin. But Ald. Walter Burnett Jr. voiced the concerns of many looking ahead to late 2022, when council members and the mayor will be months away from city elections and the federal spigot might not be pouring so freely.

“If we didn’t have money from the federal government, we would be in trouble right now,” Burnett said during an autumn hearing on the mayor’s budget proposal before the vote. “So we have to think about the future. Next year this time, I don’t want to be voting on no tax increases.”