Amid Budget Tensions, City Council Members Push to Bring Some Sunshine to City Spending – Illinois Answers Project

In Chicago, the City Council Office of Financial Analysis has rarely had more than two employees and routinely misses deadlines for the basic reports required of it. It has no guaranteed funding, limited access to data and depends on the mercies of the top city finance officials whose work it’s supposed to analyze and critique. The council faces decades of precedent in which the mayor’s office wields near-total power to craft, negotiate and execute a budget with only a cursory look from alderpeople in the weeks leading up to its passage.

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Mark Glennon on AM560’s Morning Answer: Chicago pension buyout plan mostly shifts debt rather than eliminating it, property tax surge doubles inflation over three decades

Chicago’s political leadership is floating a pension buyout program as evidence it is seriously addressing the city’s thirty-six-billion-dollar unfunded pension liability, but Mark Glennon, founder of the Illinois policy research organization Wirepoints, said that the proposal moves debt from one column to another rather than reducing it, and that the broader fiscal picture facing the city continues to deteriorate across every measurable dimension. Audio here.

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