Mayor Brandon Johnson faces a budget crisis that he and his staff saw — or should have seen — coming a mile away.
With news Monday that his administration is responding with a hiring freeze, including what reportedly is a highly unusual pause on adding new hires to Chicago’s shorthanded Police and Fire departments, Team Johnson acted like their budget woes were a bolt out of the blue.
The city faces a budget shortfall of around $223 million for the remainder of this year and a whopping additional $982 million for 2025. The 2025 shortfall was projected with uncanny accuracy a year ago. The Johnson administration had a full year to prepare for this day. As some aldermen have pointed out, the city should have frozen hiring in certain departments much earlier in the year. And that’s for starters.
The current-year budget hole is a bit more of a surprise. Much of it is due to a $175 million pension fund payment that Johnson attempted to force the Chicago Board of Education to cover via a high-cost loan. The school board took the responsible path of refusing to add more debt to a pile that already makes Chicago Public Schools the single largest junk-bond issuer in the country. That angered Johnson, but it shouldn’t have. Until a fully elected school board is in place in 2027, Johnson is in charge of the schools, as well as city government. The same taxpayers pay the freight for both, regardless of which budget covers the pension cost.
It’s not uncommon for mayors facing significant budget pressures to freeze hiring, but none that we can recall ever applied that level of austerity to the departments responsible for public safety. A mayor’s first and most important job is to keep Chicagoans safe, whether from criminals or from disasters like fires or the other emergencies that firefighters attend.
Both the Fire and Police departments are coping with long-standing shortages of personnel. The Police Department, in particular, is functioning with about 2,000 fewer officers than it had just a few years ago. Johnson, who as a Cook County commissioner called for “defunding” the police, pledged during the 2023 campaign not to cut the budget for police.
His first budget, applying to 2024, hiked police outlays slightly to about $2 billion.
The hiring freeze announcement on Monday was light on detail. Will the Police Department be allowed to fill positions left vacant by retiring officers? It appears not, judging by the wording in the memo to all departments from Budget Director Annette Guzman. “No new interviews or consensus meetings should be scheduled after the date of this memorandum,” she wrote.
At a time when Chicago is contending with a public safety crisis, treating cops, firefighters and paramedics as equal in importance to bureaucrats staffing other departments won’t sit well with a majority of residents. Nor should it. At the very least, the Police and Fire departments need to be able to hire to maintain their inadequate current staffing levels.
Johnson ought to clarify these issues at his earliest opportunity — well before the next scheduled City Council meeting on Sept. 18, after which the mayor routinely meets with reporters. Chicagoans will want to know whether this freeze applies for public safety departments in the strict manner set forth by Guzman or whether they’ll be allowed to replace those who retire or leave. Residents also will want answers on whether Johnson will allow the police and fire freeze to continue into 2025.
And, more broadly, Johnson will need to explain why he’s parting ways with the approach of past mayors, who knew what was top on the list of voters’ concerns and took care not to jeopardize public safety when facing budget crunches. By subjecting the Police and Fire departments to the same belt-tightening rules applying to less critical departments, is the mayor attempting to send a message of rebuke to affluent Chicagoans and business interests for their opposition to his many proposals to raise taxes on them in various forms?
That’s not a question we would have asked any of Chicago’s past mayors, from Richard J. Daley to Lori Lightfoot.
Separately from the philosophical underpinnings of this remarkably broad hiring freeze, what does such a blanket approach demonstrate about the Johnson administration’s ability to plan, prepare and prioritize? The depth of this fiscal challenge has been well understood for a year. In the absence of a major change of heart regarding Chicago bailout requests from a similarly budget-constrained Springfield, the challenge will be there again a year from now.
Johnson and the City Council must come to grips with a simple fact: They can’t afford the size of the city government they’re overseeing. There must be cuts, potentially in services but almost assuredly in staffing, which is 7% higher than before the pandemic.
Their job now is to prioritize which services must continue to be supported robustly and which are secondary — nice things to fund if we had the money, but we don’t right now.
For a man who repeatedly said during his campaign that there was “more than enough” in this city to bankroll his progressive, transformational dreams, the reality is inescapable now. Voters elect a mayor to run the city he finds, not the city he wishes he had. The dearth of revenues for city government has more to do with Chicago’s moribund economy than Johnson’s inability to convince Chicagoans they aren’t taxed enough.
One way to ensure the economy keeps running in place — or even to risk that it falls into recession — is to reduce the number of first responders working to make residents, tourists and business owners feel safer. Many businesses won’t invest here — and many more residents who can leave will do so — if Chicago treats public safety like just any other city service.
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