By Ed Lowe
Senior Writer
The TV cameras were all set up and the Mayor appeared in front of the assemblage of news hawks to announce, with gravity and resolution, that the city was facing a $200 million dollar shortfall in next year‘s budget. Nothing was sacred, the Mayor said, the budget would have to be brought into balance.
While the cameras ground on, he said that there would be no reduction in sanitation services, or in the presence of police and fire protection for the people of the City. However, what he didn’t rule out were increases in the gasoline, sales and real estate taxes. The budget would be examined and unneeded expenses would be eliminated.
After a respectable period of time, the Mayor’s committee would report back to him and, now, instead of the $200 million shortfall, their diligent work would have reduced the amount to a mere $188 million. That would represent a full six percent of the shortfall. But that would, they would solemnly assure everyone, be scraping the bottom of the barrel. That would be the rock bottom result of all their efforts. The Mayor would express his appreciation for their hard work, and the tax increases would be dutifully passed by the appropriate authorities.
The Mayor assured the people of the City that he was delaying the presentation of the budget to the City Council in order to review the expenses and cut some of the fat out of the budget. But he doubted that all of the unnecessary expenses could be eliminated.
Too bad that all of those "unnecessary expenses" couldn’t be identified and eliminated.
What will likely happen is that, after a few weeks of moaning and groaning among department heads in the city, there will be negligible cuts in each of the overblown departments. These cuts will be excesses that were figured into the budget when it was first submitted to the manager of things like budgets in City Hall. So, it isn’t difficult to eliminate something you never needed and which you put into your estimates in order to have something to cut from it.
What’s needed? Well, in keeping with Chicago tradition, a Blue Ribbon Panel should be appointed to work on the budget. What they would be empowered to do is cut the fat from the budget no matter which politically sensitive department was the victim of the cut. Who should make up such a panel? That’s an easy one -- the people who least benefit from the budgetary expenditures of the City. That would include residents of some of the City’s high rise public housing developments who get minimal city services -- whose elevators aren’t repaired, whose garbage is rarely collected and whose personal safety is always at risk in dark, dank, smelly hallways without adequate lighting.
Another group who might be included in this panel are some of the undocumented immigrants who can't get City jobs and who work, some even contentedly, in minimum wage no-questions-asked jobs around the City. Those are the jobs which, incidentally, replaced much higher-paying jobs that moved off shore from the City’s evaporating industrial base.
Finally, several positions on the panel should go to our school children whose classes are too large, whose teachers are unqualified and whose schools are deteriorating. We might also include a few patients at the newest version of our County Hospital, a few welfare recipients and maybe one or two street people from around and under the City.
Those who should automatically be excluded from this budget cutting committee would be trade unionists, especially those who get cushy jobs for relatives in City departments. All paving contractors should be eliminated from consideration including those who lease trucks to the City. So, too, should anyone who has ever been employed by the City, County or State. Most of the landscaping contractors, ornamental iron construction crews and others who are celebrating their clout-enhanced contracts with the City should be left out of the session.
Then, maybe we could get down to the core of the City’s budgetary problems and start working on a set of priorities different than the ones currently at the forefront of the critical cash shortfall. One thing is pretty certain. If it comes to a choice between the Mayor having to dump some of his well-connected friends from City employment and contracts on the one hand, and raising taxes on the other, you'd better get your checkbook out.
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