Good Time to Focus on City Government

This is budget time for the City of Chicago. The City Council’s Budget Committee is in the midst of meeting with all the departments to go over the proposed budget for 2025 presented by Mayor Johnson.  

These meetings are about much more than numbers. The departments generally make short presentations at the beginning of the meetings as to what they have done in 2024 and what they expect to do in 2025. The alders then ask questions about the functioning and achievements (and failures to achieve) of the departments, as well as whether more money is needed or whether and where cuts in expenses can be made.

An overview of the proposed budget and what each department does can be found in the 2025 Proposed Budget Overview prepared by the Budget Department.

So it is a great time to learn about all the different functions of city government! It is also a great time to learn about the budget process and participate by letting your alder know what you like and don’t like about the proposed budget.

This proposed budget is very controversial. Wednesday, November 13 at 9 am, there is a special meeting of the City Council solely for the purpose of considering one of the proposed ordinances associated with the budget proposal: the one that would authorize the City’s property tax levy in 2025, which currently calls for a large increase. Normally, that consideration would be done toward the end of the budget process and be done in the Finance Committee first. In fact, the Finance Committee has scheduled a public hearing on the property tax levy for November 21.

At Wednesday’s meeting, watch to see if enough alders (at least 26) show up to have a quorum to take any action. If so, watch to see if there are enough alders (at least 34) to vote to suspend the Rules to take up this proposed ordinance without having it first be dealt with in Committee. If so, then, and only then, watch to see how the alders vote on the proposal.    

You can watch this Council meeting and any of these budget meetings via livestream, or catch up later with the video recordings of each day’s meetings.

• To check what departments are meeting with the Budget Committee each day (and there are Saturday meetings!), go to the Clerk’s Electronic Legislative Management System meetings calendar.

• To watch videos of past meetings of the City Council or Committees, head to the same meetings calendar and check the right-most column of each meeting entry to see whether there is a video available to click on. (For tablets and phones, that column may not be available. Instead, simply click on the column with the date of that meeting and you will see the “Video” listed in the left-hand column if the video is available.) You can fast forward to get to the portion of the meeting you are interested in. Generally, videos are posted the same day or day after the meeting.

• To watch a meeting live, go to the Clerk’s website homepage, scroll down below the top large box (currently with the photo of the Chicago Theater), and you will see a much smaller rectangular blue box that says “Watch Now” with the name of the meeting to click on to watch. Note that this box will only be available a few minutes prior to the scheduled start of the meeting.