When election and racial justice protests rocked Chicago, the mayor used raised bridges and shut down public transportation as crowd control measures, which harmed the city’s workers.

Lightfoot says constructing the budget required putting the good of the whole city ahead of individual wards: “For the foreseeable future, we are in a period of reckoning with our past.” Leaders in Chicago not making tough choices and acting for short-term gain has been “long-term fiscally a disaster for our city,” Lightfoot says.