On October 11, 2023, Mayor Brandon Johnson delivered his $16.6 billion budget recommendations for the City of Chicago to the City Council. In July, the City of Chicago Office of Budget Management (OBM), the Mayor’s Office of Community Engagement, and the Office of Equity and Racial Justice (OERJ) partnered with UIC’s Neighborhoods Initiative (UICNI) at the Great Cities Institute to co-design and conduct engagement activities around the City’s 2024 budget. The “City of Chicago 2024 Budget Engagement Report” documents the 2024 budget engagement process and provides critical results from the engagement activities.
Activities were available in person at three public roundtables and one youth engagement event, and they were available online. In total, 812 people participated in the budget engagement.
Engagement activities gathered feedback from community members on the budget, reflections on Community-Identified Budget Ideas (community derived budget ideas and needs) and general comments regarding the budget or engagement. Data were collected in July and August 2023 across all budget engagement activities. The most noted request by topic area is as follows:
- Affordable Housing and Services to People at Risk of or Experiencing Homelessness – Develop affordable housing units across many different building types through public and nonprofit organizations, in specific areas of the city, and for designated populations.
- Community Engagement – Improve outreach and communication using strategies such as bus ads, posted information in community centers (e.g., libraries, schools, religious institutions), news media, radio, community boards, and building lists of community leaders.
- Community Safety – Cancel the ShotSpotter contract for community safety to minimize unwarranted surveillance of communities with ineffective technology.
- Environmental Justice and Infrastructure – Increase funding for public transit, including to improve affordability, develop more bus stops, increase CTA reliability, fund the Red Line extension, and ensure cleaner and more youth-friendly transportation.
- Neighborhood and Community Development and Arts and Culture – Increase investment to neighborhoods on the South and West Sides for more equitable distribution of resources to communities (and tracking of resource distribution).
- Public Health and Services and Mental Health – Provide culturally responsive mental health services, with mixed ideas on publicly run and community-run organizations, peer-to-peer approaches, and on-call social workers.
- Youth Services – Provide a greater variety of programming and offerings to occupy them and to build skills outside of school, including after-school programs, sports and clubs, arts, Big Brother/ mentorship programs, substance abuse prevention, financial literacy, gang prevention, literacy, music, sexual awareness, summer programs, tutoring services, and youth programs.
To inform the development of department budgets and the Mayor’s 2024 budget proposal, all ideas and comments collected from participants during the 2024 engagement were shared in August 2023 with City department leaders and staff. In addition, interim survey findings and data were shared with the OBM, the Mayor’s Office of Community Engagement, and the OERJ in early September 2023. Of note, Mayor Johnson mentioned new budget investments in his 2024 budget proposal that were also requested by community participants during the budget engagement (found in the City of Chicago 2024 Budget Engagement Report in the detailed results by topic area) including, but not limited to:
- Provide a $250 million investment in homelessness supports, from flexible housing, shelter operational support, and low-income home repair assistance.
- Reopen two shuttered mental health clinics as part of a pilot program in existing city buildings.
- Double the number of staff on the Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement teams that provide an alternate response to mental health calls.
- Hire new detectives by promoting 70 officers to detective since he took office, and in the budget recommendations by creating 100 additional detective positions.
- Reinstitute the city’s Department of Environment to provide support for environmental protection.
- Expand youth jobs with 76 million dollars to fund an additional 4,000 youth summer jobs next year, with the goal of 28,000 positions in the summer of 2024.
- Address lead service line replacement with an over $53 million investment.
To track progress internally, the OERJ released the City of Chicago 2024 Equity Report which reports department plans through numbers and narratives to track progress on racial equity goals. Equity was used as a lens during roundtable conversations and informed departments during their budget requests over the summer. All budget documents released by the city reside on the Office Budget and Management Microsite.
