David Greising: The problem with Mayor Brandon Johnson’s community safety fund plan |
It’s said that a budget is a moral document: The values that fill each cell of the budget spreadsheet represent the values of the author.
Mayor Brandon Johnson expressed a couple of core values when presenting his budget in mid-October. The city would create a permanent $100 million new community safety fund, Johnson said, and big corporations would pay for it.
“The top 3% of the absolute largest businesses in our city, those who have seen tremendous success and exceedingly high profits” would cover the costs, Johnson said. He would charge them a $21-per-employee fee for doing business in Chicago, projecting that to generate $100 million in new taxes each year.
After all, corporations can’t vote — except with their feet. Or by electing not to move to Chicago, because with a tax environment like that, why bother.
For Johnson, the combination of his community safety fund and a head tax to pay for it seemed a double winner of a budget plan. He got to play to the public’s demand for a safer city and trot out his “soak-the-ultra-rich” rallying cry too.
But here’s the catch: With this fund, Johnson isn’t putting big new money toward public safety programs; he just wants someone other than voting taxpayers to foot the bill.
Of that $100 million from head-tax revenue, $72 million would go toward programs the city’s corporate fund covered last year. Much of the remainder would go toward replacing discontinued federal pandemic relief funds dollar for dollar — without adding more.
The city’s first deputy budget director, Jonathan Ernst, showed me data that indicates planned spending on a program directed primarily to youth summer jobs would jump nearly 15 percent, to $49 million. But that does not account for 2025 federal pandemic relief funds that Johnson’s budget doesn’t replace, meaning the city’s total spend on the youth programs at best will be flat year over year, according to a former deputy budget........