In a few months, the City Council will decide how to spend about $2.4 billion over the next five years, for projects that run the gamut from new streets to libraries.
In the past, capital-improvement programs got little attention because few reporters or activists thought of them as an accessible single package–unlike the city’s annual budget, which is well scrutinized.
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Instead of appearing once a year in a bound book, the capital-improvement budget is a five-year plan revised year by year; it’s much more fluid. The plan shows how the city proposes to spend money from a variety of state, federal, and local sources. As most insiders explain, it begins as a wish list, drawn up by the heads of the city’s 16 departments at the request of the mayor’s Office of Budget Management, the administration’s number crunchers.
In addition, Washington was under fierce pressure to show his loyalty to influential developers, who tended to have conventional ideas of how money should be spent. He was never able to muster much support from white Chicagoans, so his reelection was by no means guaranteed. He needed all the downtown ribbon-cutting ceremonies he could get to undercut the notion that he was some kind of irresponsible radical bent on redistributing city funds.
“The city doesn’t do a good job of coordinating public-works projects,” says Leavy. “There was this one horror story about an intersection at 63rd and Wentworth on the south side. They had lowered the street so that trucks could get under the viaduct. And then a few months later, Streets and Sanitation repaved the street, which in effect raised it. And trucks couldn’t get under the viaduct anymore. They completely crossed each other out.”
“Navy Pier is targeted for millions of dollars in programs, even though no one is sure what they are going to use it for,” says Andrew Goldsmith, executive director of the Industrial Council of Northwest Chicago, a not-for-profit association of small manufacturers. “So many times things get done here not because they need to be done but because we have a political need to satisfy. Look at the new stadiums. It’s going to cost millions of dollars to prepare the infrastructure to build them. But we don’t ask ourselves: ‘Do we really need them?’ or ‘How can we spend our money for the best economic results?’”
It’s still doubtful that the aldermen will show much independence, now that Richard M. Daley is mayor and the council has reverted to being a rubber stamp. But the potential for independence is there.
