Commentary: Chicago public officials must cut the fat before begging for taxpayer bailouts

Yahoo

2 days ago

As Yankees baseball legend and iconic quipster Yogi Berra is famously quoted as saying, 'It's deja vu all over again.'
Once again the perennially and preternaturally cash-strapped city of Chicago, State of Illinois, Chicago Transit Authority, Metra and Chicago Public Schools are pointing at Washington, D.C., with their hands out, shaking their tin cups and blaming the federal government for letting the COVID cash faucet run dry.
The message they're sending Washington, and local taxpayers, is as audacious as it is absurd: 'We're broke because you stopped giving us free money.'
Not a word about decades of mismanagement. Not a whisper about institutional waste and inefficiency. And no sign that anyone in Springfield, City Hall, or the transit and CPS boardrooms is willing to make the hard choices that real leaders are supposed to make when times get tough.
I watched this sad scenario play out for 37 years as a local journalist and 10 more as a good government watchdog, and nothing has changed.
The pandemic didn't break their budgets — it merely exposed how broken they already were.
The CTA is projecting a $600 million shortfall next year as federal pandemic aid evaporates. But instead of tackling excessive operating costs, administrative bloat and outdated labor rules, executives are spending their time lobbying for a federal or state bailout — one they know won't fix a single structural problem.
Anyone who's taken the Red Line after dark knows the CTA doesn't just need more money — it needs more competence. Meanwhile, transit leadership continues to drive or be driven to work instead of riding, top managers cash six-plus figure paychecks and union contracts are treated like sacred texts instead of the fungible documents they need to be in the post-COVID era.
Then there's City Hall, where Mayor Brandon Johnson is asking for hundreds of millions in new federal and state funds to prevent drastic service cuts while also rolling out feel-good programs with questionable funding sources.
The migrant crisis, pension time bombs and public safety concerns are real. But rather than prioritize, consolidate and streamline, Johnson's team is cobbling together budget Band-Aids and sending invoices to D.C. or Springfield hoping Uncle Sam or Uncle J.B.— more accurately, taxpayers — will foot the bill.
As for the state, the other bailout target of local governments, the picture's not much better. Gov. JB Pritzker proudly touted Illinois' temporary budget surpluses during the pandemic, but those were largely a mirage — the result of federal stimulus funds and delayed spending.
Now that the spigot's shut off, the state's back to deficit projections and renewed calls for 'revenue enhancements' — political code for higher taxes on the very companies and people that are already exiting Illinois in record numbers.
Finally, few local institutions are as financially fragile, and equally shameless, as CPS, which is projecting a $391 million budget gap next year; and like its sister agencies, pointing fingers at Washington and Springfield instead of looking in the mirror.
'The cliff is coming,' CPS officials say, referring to the end of federal COVID relief funding. But what they don't say is they built their post-pandemic budget on a sandcastle of temporary dollars with no plan for how to sustain expanded staffing and programs once that tide inevitably went out.
Rather than using the federal windfall to right-size operations or address glaring long-term issues like special education, building maintenance, union overreach and enrollment-based reallocations, CPS went on a hiring spree, expanded programs without metrics, approved generous union contracts and padded administrative overhead. The real outrage? CPS is bleeding students — enrollment is down by more than 85,000 since 2010, but the budget keeps ballooning. We're paying more to educate fewer children, with less to show for it.
Nobody seems willing to talk about the elephant in every government room: Waste, in its multiple iterations; there's enough fat in these budgets to make a butcher weep. But trimming it would require the kind of political courage we haven't seen in decades. It would mean saying no to special interests, rethinking sacred cows and upsetting the apple cart of status quo politics — a cart too many of our leaders are riding in comfortably.
Instead, our politicians are taking the easy way out: Blame Washington, Springfield or the allegedly undertaxed wealthy, ask for more money and cross their fingers that voters won't notice the hypocrisy.
It's fiscal malpractice dressed up as righteous indignation. And let's be clear about one thing: The federal government doesn't owe them another dime. COVID relief was meant to be temporary — a bridge over troubled waters — not a permanent subsidy for governments that refuse to adapt.
If local and state leaders treated those funds as lifelines rather than blank checks, they would've used the past three years to modernize, trim and right-size their operations. Instead, they papered over the cracks, kicked the cans down the road and now expect Washington and wealthy taxpayers to refill the punch bowl.
Chicagoans, and all Illinoisans, deserve much better. They deserve transit systems that work, budgets that balance and leaders who don't use crises as a cover for failure. They deserve governments that take responsibility for their own finances before asking others to bail them out.
There's a concept in the private sector called accountability. When companies run out of money, they cut costs, restructure or go bankrupt. They don't send letters to Washington or Springfield demanding a lifeline because their customers stopped coming. But in the public sector, failure is rewarded with more funding and fewer questions.
That needs to change. And it starts with us — the voters, the taxpayers and the residents. We need to stop accepting the tired narrative that more money will fix everything, and stop rewarding the elected and appointed leaders who espouse that canard.
We need to demand audits, zero-based budgeting and creative, humane staff and agency cutbacks. We need to demand efficiency, and call out the bureaucratic inertia that keeps our governments stuck in a cycle of dysfunction.
So the next time a city, state or transit agency asks for a bailout, the first question we should ask is simple: What have you cut from your own budget?
If their answer is 'nothing,' or obfuscation, our answer to their request should be just as simple: 'No!' And many of those doing the asking should be pointed to the exit door.
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Andy Shaw is a longtime Chicago journalist and former president of the Better Government Association.
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