Mayor Emanuel ready to unveil last budget plan

Mayor Rahm Emanuel will use his final budget address Wednesday to try to underline his legacy on big-picture issues such as financial stability, education and public safety — making the case he’s leaving Chicago well-positioned for the future.

But the finer details of his eighth city budget will focus on the nitty-gritty details of city governance, with modestly expanded investments in the kinds of street- and alley-level ward services residents can see each day, what Emanuel called “the block and tackle of what makes the 77 neighborhoods work.” They include more garbage and recycling carts, rat poisoning and tree trimming.

Though Emanuel will point out in his speech the tough decisions he’s made to shore up the city’s finances, the next person to occupy his fifth-floor City Hall office will inherit a looming pension cliff. Annual required pension contributions are expected to grow by more than $900 million between 2019 and 2023.

And while the mayor said during a Friday interview that he would take steps to address unfunded pensions after the 2019 budget gets passed, he declined to say whether he will go ahead with a plan he floated this summer to borrow up to $10 billion to lower the city’s pension debt.

“Since day one I said first deal with the structural budget, second deal with the pensions. It’s a sequencing,” he said. “I have followed that theory, or that sequence, all the way through. Right now, my focus: Wednesday, deliver the budget, present it.”

Included in the budget part of that sequence will be money for politically important increases such as an additional $1.3 million to buy garbage and recycling bins to try to reduce the wait time for people to get new ones from the city.

There also will be $500,000 more for rat abatement compared with last year, money that would go toward “blitzes” in heavily infested areas. Streets and Sanitation crews would reach out to homeowners to get permission to go into their yards to look for rat holes and deal with them, rather than waiting for residents to call and ask for the service.

Emanuel’s proposed spending plan also calls a $308,000 bump in funding for tree trimming, another service aldermen annually complain doesn’t get a big-enough cut of the budget pie.

The annual budget speech is one of the mayor’s few moments to speak to a large audience about his take on the state of the city. It figures to be less about rats than about his most flattering appraisal of his two-term stewardship. “I think you appreciate the eighth and final budget speech when you read the first budget speech,” he said. “The city was at a precipice, for lack of a better word. This speech is not just the nuts and bolts. It’s an easier budget. But it reflects the distance we have gone.”

This budget should be among his simplest to pass, because it doesn’t contain the politically dangerous giant tax and fee hikes re-election seeking aldermen would be loath to support months before their names appear on the ballot.

Emanuel set up this lighter election year budget lift by frontloading previous budgets with massive property tax increases aimed at fixing the city’s underfunded pensions, plus big bumps to water fees, a new monthly trash collection fee, a higher 911 fee on phone lines and other new revenue streams.

Still, while he’s not on the ballot after suddenly dropping out of the mayoral race last month, Emanuel has acknowledged voters may hold those earlier votes against his City Council allies. On Wednesday, he handed out $20,000 checks to more than two dozen aldermen who’ve supported his agenda to thank them and help them with their campaigns.