The first thing you need to know about Mayor Daley’s budget, released on October 10, is that it’s nothing more than a projection. The mayor’s bean counters calculate how much money the city can expect to take in through fees, fines, and taxes over the next year and balance that against the amount they plan to spend. If, one year later, the city brings in more or spends less than anticipated, there’s a surplus and taxpayers would theoretically get a refund (ha ha ha). If it brings in less or spends more, there’s a deficit, requiring new fees and taxes to make up the difference.
He promised to use some of the new tax revenue to “build or renovate more than ten libraries across the city.” That pledge caught most listeners by surprise. Nothing against libraries. But with all the problems facing the city–failing schools, mass layoffs of teachers, nurses, and prosecutors, the CTA yet again threatening to raise fares and shut down routes, and the county crying for its own huge tax hike–are branch libraries really a top priority? Most aldermen figured the mayor was using them to conceal his true purposes.
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There, my friends, is a clue to where your future tax dollars will be going and why they need a major boost. And it has nothing to do with libraries. Chicagoans may think of the Olympics as a pipe dream, too far down the road and too unlikely to come here to be worth worrying about. But as Hersh’s article indicates, the fight to win the Olympic bid is on. By January 14, 2008, the seven cities still in the running for the 2016 games will have to submit a “mini bid book”–a detailed description of their vision, plans, budget, and funding–to the IOC. (Aside from Chicago, the other bidders are Tokyo; Rio de Janeiro; Madrid; Prague; Doha, Qatar; and Baku, Azerbaijan.) In June the IOC will eliminate three candidates, narrowing the field to four entrants, who will vie for the prize that will be announced in 2011. For Daley and his Olympic planners it’s crunch time.
Mayor Daley continues to claim that private backers have been lined up to underwrite the games, but neither he nor Chicago 2016 has released any names. He says he has to keep the investors secret to avoid divulging critical trade secrets to rival cities.
For more on politics, see our blog Clout City at chicagoreader.com.
