Two weeks before election day, mayoral contenders Rahm Emanuel and Gery Chico made their most expansive comments Tuesday about how they would tackle the most pressing problem facing the city — its gaping budget deficit.
On his campaign website, Emanuel listed a series of ideas that he said would save the city $500 million. The first step he would take if elected, he said, would be to order his Cabinet members to cut spending by $75 million within 60 days of taking office.
But Emanuel declined to provide specific proposals for dealing with the city’s underfunded employee pensions in what was billed as his last major speech before the Feb. 22 election.
In each of the past few years, retiring Mayor Richard M. Daley‘s administration has struggled as spending outstripped revenues by hundreds of millions of dollars. Daley has coped with the problem by leasing city assets such as the parking meter system and spending almost all of the proceeds of those long-term concession agreements.
Without specifically referring to Daley, Emanuel said the city could no longer continue to balance its books “through one-time fixes and stopgap measures.”
“The day of reckoning has arrived,” Emanuel said in a speech at a T-shirt company warehouse on the near West Side.
The biggest savings, according to Emanuel’s website, would “come from reducing layers of management bureaucracy and consolidating redundant tasks.” Moves such as merging City Hall departments would trim $80 million from the budget, he said.
Emanuel also repeated his earlier pledge to save about $65 million by reforming the city’s garbage pick-up system. That plan has raised fears among unionized public workers that Emanuel would privatize one of the most important — and labor-intensive — functions of city government.
Organized labor also is alarmed at the prospect of dramatic changes in employee pensions if voters elect the former White House chief of staff and front-runner in polls. The Chicago News Cooperative reported last month that Emanuel told union officials in a closed-door meeting that he favors reducing pensions for current employees as well as new hires.
The other candidates have disagreed with that notion, and many labor groups, including the unions representing city police, firefighters and laborers, have endorsed Chico. Emanuel shrugged off those endorsements for his rival.
“I know that even mentioning these things can cost me some political support and endorsements,” he said of the controversial pension issue. “I am comfortable with that because I think it’s my responsibility to level with the people of Chicago” before they choose Daley’s successor.
In his speech Tuesday, and in the news conference after the campaign event, Emanuel said the city cannot afford to do nothing about pensions — but he still would not say what he thinks the city should do.
About an hour after Emanuel’s speech, the Chico campaign issued a statement that “outlined his approach to restore fiscal responsibility at City Hall.” Unlike Emanuel, Chico did not itemize how he would try to balance the budget, instead focusing on his experience dealing with the finances of the Chicago Public Schools during his tenure as Daley’s school board president. Chico also one of many Daley chiefs of staff during his 22 years as mayor.
Without offering specifics, Chico said he “would strip down the budget, re-prioritize spending and rebuild the budget line by line” and “would also save the city tens of millions by ending sweetheart deals and patronage.”
Chico said Emanuel “left his post in Washington, D.C. with a $1.4 trillion deficit.”