In November the Chicago Park District released its 1993 budget, and the city yawned. Apparently the media had more important things to think about, like the City Hall squabble over Mayor Daley’s proposed $48 million property-tax hike. The Park District’s proposed budget received little coverage in the dailies and barely a mention on TV. “It’s as though the Park District wasn’t there,” says Erma Tranter, executive director of the Friends of the Parks, a watchdog group. “And that’s a shame.”
But Tranter and other activists contend the Park District’s tax levy has been rising for years. They also claim the district has never made a serious attempt to reduce spending by cutting staff, reducing energy costs, or reforming costly union work rules. “Every year it’s the same old thing: the Park District’s budget goes up even though the Park District says it’s going down,” says Tranter. “This year they are admitting to raising taxes, but then they make the budget process so confusing it’s hard to see how much taxes really will go up. The bottom line is that the district has not done nearly enough to trim the waste out of the budget.”
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Park District officials say it would be irresponsible to anticipate such expenditures in a budget. “There are certain rules you have to go by in accounting,” says Terry Barella, the district’s budget director. “And one is that you don’t guess what you are going to sell in bonds. We may not sell those bonds in April. It would be parallel to saying, ‘We’re going to have a Rolling Stones concert in Soldier Field this summer.’ Well, I might like that and I might want to anticipate the revenue, but we aren’t going to appropriate expenditures based on our wishes.”
One of the first acts of any incoming superintendent is to rearrange the organization chart. “You might see a department’s name changed, but you never see it completely eliminated,” says Tranter. “In the last few years I’ve counted four new departments, most of which are unnecessary. In the old days concessions or permits might have been handled by someone out of the general superintendent’s office. Now we have a concession department and a permit department. Each of them has its own staff. The bureaucracy grows.”
