The “2022 Budget Community Engagement Report” documents the 2022 Budget Engagement process and provides key findings from the internal and external engagement. The 2022 Budget Community Engagement process was the earliest and most multi-faceted engagement process ever conducted for the City’s budget.
Mayor Lightfoot at a small group discussion at one of the Public Budget Forums.
On September 20, 2021 Mayor Lori Lightfoot unveiled her $16.7 billion budget for the City of Chicago. In the months leading up to the release of the budget, the City conducted a community engagement process and obtained the assistance of UIC’s Neighborhoods Initiative (UICNI) at the Great Cities Institute to design and facilitate internal and external engagement activities. The “2022 Budget Community Engagement Report” documents the 2022 Budget Engagement process and provides key findings from the internal and external engagement. The 2022 Budget Community Engagement process was the earliest and most multi-faceted engagement process ever conducted for the City’s budget.
The engagement process had two phases: an information gathering phase and a ground truthing phase.
The first phase garnered community input for the draft city department budgets, which were due in July. In addition, feedback in phase one was used by the City to develop a list of draft budget investment initiatives called Responsive Initiatives. These were then used to frame the second phase of engagement, including the gathering of additional community feedback. The first phase of the 2022 Budget Engagement process took place from June 4, 2021 through July 1, 2021 and included:
The second phase took the synthesized community input and created the Responsive Initiatives for reaction by subject matter focus groups and general public. The second phase of the 2022 Budget Engagement took place from July 27, 2021 through August 12, 2021 and included:
Detailed descriptions of each engagement activity are documented including dates of the meetings, participants, purpose of the meeting, and an overview of the facilitation plan.
The report includes a summary of investment ideas and feedback on needed programs and services and policy suggestions across all community engagement activities. Detailed results from each engagement activity are also provided in the appendix.
The top three programs and services that participants suggested across all engagement activities include:
The community engagement results were used by the City to inform 2022 budget decision making. The decision-making process included finalizing the Responsive Initiatives and tying them directly to budget investments. The Responsive Initiatives, which are budget investment needs such as “provide more youth wrap around services,” were finalized based upon community engagement results. The City released Final Responsive Initiatives Report that lists the final Responsive Initiatives alongside the corresponding responsible City Department and 2022 Budget and/or Chicago Recovery Plan (American Rescue Plan funding plan) specific initiative, program, or service that addresses each item.
(Image: Susan Santola, Advance Local)
Cleveland.com talked to Thea Crum, associate director of the neighborhoods initiative at the UIC Great Cities Institute, about the institute’s role in PB Chicago, a partnership of public officials, nonprofit organizations, foundations, and others who collaborate to guide citizen involvement in participatory budgeting in the city.
Thea Crum, director of the Great Cities Institute’s Neighborhoods Initiative, said the process begins with “idea collection.” Organizers explain the rules about how the money can be used and how it’s been used in the past, then ask residents how they would like to spend the money based on the needs in their community.
“It was kind of scary, and people didn’t use [the pedestrian underpass],” Crum said. “So, most of the time, people were crossing over the train tracks. A young man, a teenager, actually was killed crossing the train tracks.”
(Image: NBC Chicago)
NBC 5 Chicago’s latest “Violence in Chicago” segment, which examines disinvestment in city neighborhoods, features findings from a 2017 UIC Great Cities Institute report on youth joblessness.
Full story from NBC 5 Chicago »
(Image: Chang W. Lee / The New York Times)
A New York Times article about a new California law that requires warehouses like Amazon to disclose quotas and work speed metrics to employees and government agencies includes comments from Beth Gutelius, research director for the Center for Urban Economic Development at UIC and senior research specialist with the Great Cities Institute at UIC, who says the legislation is unprecedented as it mediates the ways that technology is used in the workplace.
“I believe one of Amazon’s biggest competitive advantages over rivals is this ability to monitor their work force, prod workers to work faster and discipline workers when they fail to meet quotas,” said Beth Gutelius, research director at the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois Chicago.
“It’s unprecedented for a bill to intervene like this in the ways that technology is used in the workplace,” added Dr. Gutelius, who focuses on warehousing and logistics.
Image: Sean Rayford / Getty Images
Nik Theodore, UIC professor and head of urban planning and policy, director of the Center for Urban Economic Development and fellow at the Great Cities Institute, is quoted in an online story from NBC News on the booming business of disaster recovery due to increasing weather and climate events.
It can be a grueling and dangerous job. In the first weeks after a natural disaster, government agencies are often stretched or have broken down leading to confusion, even chaos, on the ground, said Nik Theodore, a professor in the University of Illinois Chicago’s Department of Urban Planning and Policy. While some companies bus in their own crews, many contractors use social media to find workers or pick up day laborers, often in front of hardware stores, he said. Such ad hoc strategies can lead to wage theft and makes it difficult for workers to recover pay.
“The disaster recovery zone becomes the Wild West, where a lot of rules go out the window,” he said.
Image: Mary Hall, Katherine Nagasawa / WBEZ
In an online story from WBEZ, Jim Lewis, a senior research specialist with UIC’s Great Cities Institute, offers insight on the process and laws surrounding the remapping of Chicago’s aldermanic ward boundaries.
“Every 10 years, we learn from the census what the population of different places is. … We learn that people have moved, people have been born, people have died,” said Jim Lewis, a senior researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago Great Cities Institute. “And so what was the same size 10 years ago is no longer the same size today.”
“There’s no law that says they have to be racially balanced — that only comes into play if you don’t do it, and somebody sues you,” Lewis said.
“Because of where people happen to live, it isn’t always easy,” Lewis said. “If you draw a checkerboard of the city, you wouldn’t get the racial ethnic representation that would represent the democratic proportions of different racial groups. And the reason is that in different parts of the city, different groups live in different concentrations. … You are going to have to draw some wards that are not squares or circles.”
“And there’s nothing in state or local law that says you can’t draw districts to favor particular incumbents or favor political parties,” Lewis said.
(Image: Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
Beth Gutelius, research director for the Center for Urban Economic Development at UIC and senior research specialist with the Great Cities Institute at UIC, addresses warehouse work surveillance in comments featured in a Los Angeles Times article on proposed California legislation that would require warehouses like Amazon to disclose quotas and work speed metrics to employees and government agencies.
“In the U.S., we are at an inflection point on the question of how technologies are used in workplaces and what rights workers have to data collected about them,” said Beth Gutelius, research director at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Center for Urban Economic Development and an authority on logistics.
Analysis from Matthew Wilson, senior research specialist with the Great Cities Institute, is featured in a Bisnow article on U.S. Census Bureau figures and trends in Chicago.
GCI Director Teresa Córdova was the guest host for the sixth and final podcast in The Sawyer Seminar, a series of conversations hosted by UIC scholars sponsored by AirGo and UIC’s Social Justice Initiative. She is joined by José Bravo, the Executive Director of Just Transition Alliance, and José Acosta-Cordova, the Environmental Planning and Research Organizer at LVEJO. The trio breaks down how the work has shifted over the last thirty years, some of the false solutions to climate change that are being proposed, and the value of multigenerational organizing in the Environmental Justice movement.