It was in the eleventh hour of last week’s special Cook County Board meeting, called to pass a $2.9 billion budget that’s months overdue, that a few board members began singing “Kumbaya.”
“I don’t put all these amendments in here to cause fights,” Quigley said. “I mean, if all you wanna do with these things is to hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya,’ I mean, we’re wasting a lot of folks’ time here.”
The board last dealt with the county budget at a February 3 meeting of its finance committee–which is simply the board calling itself the finance committee and being chaired by Commissioner John Daley. Stroger’s original budget back in October called for a .25 percent county sales tax increase and a new 4 percent lease tax on nearly anything you might rent besides housing. That way he could make 2004 the fifth year in a row without a property tax hike.
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Stroger’s office distributes a letter from county comptroller John Chambers and chief financial officer Thomas Glaser detailing “revised estimates” of several county funds. The revisions include $20 million in brand-new money the commissioners hadn’t even known existed–about $14 million from the Unknown Heirs Legal Settlement and $6 million from the Treasurer Indemnity Fund Escheatment. It’s Stroger’s end run around the opposition’s proposals to slash the budget.
Claypool sarcastically calculates that $5.5 million in cuts amounts to “just point 000000001 percent”–meaning .001–of the $2.9 billion budget. “In light of $500 million in new taxes in the last decade alone, six major new taxes in 12 years, these cuts are not enough,” he declares.
Collins’s proposals begin getting called, most dealing with reforms to give the board more power versus its president. One by one Stroger and others complain and find problems. Her amendment number 20 sounds sensible enough: “Only issues related to revenue, finance, and appropriations will be referred to the Finance Committee.”
