Are You Ready for Chicago’s 2024 Budget Bingo?

Do you like dramatic city council meetings, municipal finance, and/or winning cool prizes? Then you’ll love City Bureau’s fourth annual Chi Budget Bingo.

By H Kapp-Klote, Grace Del Vecchio and India Daniels

It’s been a long budget season in Chicago.

Chicago’s process for approving the upcoming year’s budget is always long, of course. All-day hearings, endless PDFs, and wonky back and forth between alders and department heads over six weeks will tire out even the biggest municipal nerds.

But this year’s 2024 budget season feels especially long. Mayor Brandon Johnson’s first budget proposal hasn’t received that much pushback — it doesn’t raise property taxes, after all — but it has coincided with some particularly fraught moments at City Hall.

From contentious debate over how and where the city is responding as thousands of asylum seekers continue to arrive to a literal “lights out” moment to shut down a special meeting that didn’t reach quorum — it’s all made the 2024 city budget season a wild ride.

Finding the fun may be the only way to make it through the final meeting, where alders are supposed to vote “yea” or “nay” on the 2024 budget.

So that means….BUDGET BINGO.

What to Know About the City Budget Pre-Bingo:

We’ve been hard at work all season contextualizing what’s happening at public meetings about the budget. We threw a mayoral budget address watch party, analyzed what Johnson is calling “a People’s Budget” and dug into the financial impact of police misconduct settlements.

Here are a few critical questions ahead of Wednesday (you can also check out more background from our budget watch party):

What Does It Mean to Be a Sanctuary City?

The 2024 budget proposal touts $150 million for shelter and basic needs for recently-arrived migrants. That’s a lot of money, but to put it into perspective, Chicago is well on its way to spending over $361 million this year on what’s so far been a pretty uncoordinated and subpar response. Johnson is hoping the state and federal governments foot the rest of the bill but it’s anyone’s guess how that will pan out.

Chicago’s sanctuary status dates back to 1985, when Mayor Harold Washington issued an executive order barring city employees from asking about someone’s immigration status or denying city services because of it. It does not place any sort of legal obligation on the city’s spending when it comes to the arrival of thousands of migrants, but it’s a moral stance that has made Chicago the destination for so many buses from the southern border, and some alders feel the city should be prioritizing their communities. It’s created sharp division in City Council, and it’s going to take more than a hug between Alds. Carlos Ramirez Rosa and Emma Mitts to get on the same page.

What Happens Next with Treatment Not Trauma?

The 2024 budget proposal includes funding to hire more mental and community health workers and reopen two shuttered mental health clinics. It would also double the staffing for non-police crisis response teams with an investment of $15.9 million.

As we heard at our recent Public Newsroom with folks working to implement Treatment Not Trauma, the City of Chicago’s divestment from public mental health care isn’t due to a lack of resources. It is the result of multiple mayoral administrations deciding mental health care wasn’t a financial priority.

While the budget allocation makes it possible, the specifics — where the clinics will open, when they’ll get up and running, staffing, what a serious reinvestment in a coordinated public mental health system looks like — will be up to a working group that got the green light at the last possible minute before the 2024 budget was published.

How Will Voters Respond to Bringing Chicago Home?

When he first ran for mayor, Johnson expressed support for a proposal to create a dedicated funding stream for homelessness prevention tacked on to the tax on large real estate transactions, sponsored by a coalition of organizations focused on addressing homelessness called Bring Chicago Home. A current tax on homeshares like Airbnbs currently brings in around $15 million a year; Bring Chicago Home could generate six times that. Johnson has also signaled his support for this coalition by hiring the city’s first “chief homelessness officer.” This week, City Council passed an ordinance that would put Bring Chicago Home to voters via ballot referendum. Still, questions about precisely how that money could be allocated, particularly in the face of the housing crisis facing asylum seekers is still relevant to City Council.

How Can the City Better Account for Funding for the Chicago Police Department?

The Chicago Police Department budget consistently takes up a third of the city’s Corporate Fund, but Mayor Brandon Johnson has had to tread carefully due to past remarks about defunding the police. In keeping with a campaign promise to hire more detectives, he proposed an addition of 400 civilian positions and 100 detectives, plus 31 slots for investigators and three supervising investigators. The total number of employees would remain steady at just over 14,000, but with fewer of the typical cops you see on the street.

Police misconduct is also costing the city big. The city’s Law Department is budgeting to spend more than half of its allocation for legal settlements and judgments on it — $82 million — on them, including decades-worth of complex wrongful conviction cases. All this drama will come to a head on November 15, when we will watch and wonder as alders discuss and ultimately approve or deny the final budget.

How To Play Budget Bingo:

Playing along at home is easy – we will live tweet the meeting and announce as each bingo square is checked off in real time. (Don’t worry, we’ll also have another thread with a play-by-play of the meeting, as usual). After you pull up a City Council Bingo board, play online by listening to the livestream at http://www.chicityclerk.com/ under “Meeting Notices” — or follow our live-tweeting thread @CHIdocumenters for #ChiBudgetBingo to mark your board

For example: we’ll let you know when Ald. Andre Vasquez says something funny so you can check off that box on your card (click on a square to check it off or download your card).

The first person to fill out their winning card by getting 5 in a row and email picture of their Bingo to documenters@citybureau.org is the winner!

They might even get a prize (beyond the personal fulfillment that comes with surviving another Chicago budget season).

Will the alders’ proposed amendments make it through?

Will the budget pass?

Is everyone okay?

Tune into #ChiBudgetBingo on Wednesday, Nov. 15, at 10 a.m. to find out.

What To Do While You Wait:

Review our Public Newsroom with an Albany Park church that is one of the many mutual aid groups stepping up to support and house migrants.

Check out this article from our Newswire team to learn more about the city’s budget approval process.