The last time the Chicago City Council challenged a mayor on his budget was in 1985, at the height of Council Wars. Led by the aldermanic Eddies–Vrdolyak and Burke–the majority bloc of opposition aldermen threatened to bring city services to a halt unless Mayor Harold Washington made some last-minute changes to the budget.
Simpson has written, with four graduate students, “The City Council’s Role in Chicago Budget Making,” a 31-page analysis of council voting patterns on the budget over the last three years. The report concludes that since Washington took control of the City Council in 1986–and particularly now under Mayor Richard M. Daley–the aldermen have abdicated most of their responsibility in regard to the budget. In essence, the city is an autocracy in which the aldermen “remain virtual bystanders”–too dumb, scared, or lazy to challenge the boss.
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Both sides agree, however, that the process of setting the budget can be bewildering. The budget document itself is a 400-page text with 200,000 separate items that detail how the city plans to raise and spend roughly $3 billion a year.
“There have always been a few independents and some machine turks–like Burke–who took the time to master the budget. But most aldermen don’t even try to comprehend it. They’ll fight like hell to see that their ward gets street-sweeping services, or that their favorite precinct captain gets a raise. But they’re not going to work hard to understand the budget. They don’t see the payoff for putting in the time to do that. Better to just give the mayor whatever he wants.”
A few independents back then proposed alternative budgets. But the other aldermen generally ignored them. The council usually approved Daley’s budget without major changes long before the December 31 deadline.
Still, it was an arresting drama that revealed how politics shapes policy and how little absolute truth there is to a budget.
“A budget is often a political document,” says Simpson. “A mayor’s budget assertions should always be challenged. But he won’t be challenged if the council is not active. We had an active council during Council Wars.”
