Mayor Lori Lightfoot will give a speech later this month about the city’s massive looming budget deficit, which is expected to approach $1 billion, and follow up with four town halls across Chicago, her administration announced Friday.
The city also is conducting an online survey asking people to weigh in with their fiscal priorities, as well as which taxes they would increase to offset its expected budget hole. Lightfoot’s “State of the City” speech will be broadcast from downtown’s Harold Washington Library Center at 6 p.m. Aug. 29.
Lightfoot took office in May facing a gaping budget hole in the next fiscal year starting Jan. 1, the first citywide spending plan she’ll have to propose and push through the City Council.
It had been expected that when Lightfoot took office and prepared her 2020 budget, she would have to come up with a combined $528 million in tax increases and budget cuts. But in May, officials in then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration predicted the shortfall would be worse because of costs previously covered with expensive borrowing practices and the city’s pension investments’ poor performance at the end of 2018 as the stock market took a dive.
Lightfoot has previously disputed the Emanuel administration’s $700 million budget hole estimate, saying, “It’s worse than that.” Her administration, however, has not yet offered its own estimate.
After a City Council meeting this summer, the mayor said residents will need to pay more to plug the city’s next budget shortfall, though she didn’t offer specifics.
"There’s no question we’re going to have to come to the taxpayers and ask for additional revenue,” Lightfoot said.
Raising taxes is a delicate dance anywhere, but particularly in Chicago, where even Lightfoot as a candidate said the tax burden is forcing residents out of the city. In her budget speech, the mayor is expected to highlight ways the city has found or will find cost savings as she lays out her revenue proposals.
At an unrelated news conference Friday, Lightfoot said she will try to “demonstrate to taxpayers that we understand the pain and the burden that they’ve been facing with taxes.”
“And I get it. I hear it literally everywhere I go, particularly around property taxes, and I’m very mindful of that,” Lightfoot said. "But the reality is, given the gap we’re going to face next year, given the pension payments that are demanded, we are going to have to look for additional revenue sources, there’s no question about that.”
Lightfoot also reiterated on Friday that the city will need help from legislators in Springfield.
“We have been since the time of the transition in conversation with the governor and his team, the legislative leaders and their respective teams. We need to have help from Springfield to address the challenges that we have in the city,” Lightfoot said. "Now some people say, ‘Well, we can’t do a Chicago bailout,’ but the reality is, Chicago is 80% of the economy of this state. We are the driver of the economics in the upper Midwest. So investing in Chicago, investing in our kids, helping us address some of our financial needs, is investing in the state.”
Lightfoot’s town halls will be Sept. 4 at the Copernicus Center on the Northwest Side at 6 p.m.; Sept. 14 at Clemente High School on the West Side at 9 a.m.; Sept. 19 at Southeast United Methodist Youth and Community Center at 6 p.m.; and Sept. 25 at Lindblom Math and Science Academy on the South Side at 6 p.m.
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