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Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot holds her weekly press briefing at City Hall in Chicago on Aug. 12, 2019.
Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot holds her weekly press briefing at City Hall in Chicago on Aug. 12, 2019.
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Days before she’s scheduled to give a speech on Chicago’s massive budget deficit, Mayor Lori Lightfoot has imposed a hiring freeze across all departments and positions in city government, including police.

The administration announced the move in a memo earlier this week from Budget Director Susie Park to all city commissioners and department heads. In an interview, Park told the Tribune there are about 3,000 vacancies citywide affected by the freeze.

“As you are all aware, the city is facing a large budget deficit next year,” Park wrote in an Aug. 20 memo. “In advance of upcoming discussions regarding reductions that will be required for the 2020 budget, effective immediately and until further notice, the Office of Budget and Management is implementing a hiring freeze across all funds, including grants. The hiring freeze is applicable to all departments and positions.”

The news comes as Lightfoot is scheduled to give a televised speech about the city’s massive looming budget deficit. The city also is conducting an online survey asking people to weigh in with their fiscal priorities, as well as which taxes they would increase to offset its expected budget hole. Lightfoot’s “State of the City” speech will be broadcast at 6 p.m. Thursday from downtown’s Harold Washington Library Center.

Lightfoot took office in May facing a gaping budget hole in the next fiscal year starting Jan. 1, the first citywide spending plan she’ll have to propose and push through the City Council.

When Lightfoot took office and prepared her 2020 budget, it was expected she would have to come up with a combined $528 million in tax increases and budget cuts. But in May, officials in then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration predicted the shortfall would be closer to $700 million because of costs previously covered with expensive borrowing practices and the city’s pension investments’ poor performance at the end of 2018 as the stock market took a dive.

Lightfoot has previously disputed the Emanuel administration’s budget hole estimate, saying, “It’s worse than that.” Her administration, however, has not yet offered its own estimate.

The mayor repeatedly has said she will seek internal cuts before asking taxpayers to pay more as part of her next budget.

“What she has asked of me and her commitment is, we will look internally first at government and see where those savings and efficiencies can come from,” Park said.

Park said the city is reviewing all budgets and taking a “hard look at our programs, services and operational needs” as the city faces “one of the largest budgetary gaps in recent history.” It was unclear how much the city expected to save with the new limits on hiring.

After a City Council meeting this summer, the mayor said residents will need to pay more to plug the budget shortfall, though she didn’t offer specifics.

The mayor reiterated that point earlier this month.

“But the reality is, given the gap we’re going to face next year, given the pension payments that are demanded, we are going to have to look for additional revenue sources, there’s no question about that,” Lightfoot said.

Raising taxes is a delicate dance anywhere, but particularly in Chicago, where even Lightfoot as a candidate said the tax burden is forcing residents out of the city.

Ahead of next week’s speech, Lightfoot has reiterated that the city will “need to have help from Springfield to address the challenges that we have in the city.”

That could take the form of a sales tax on professional services, which Illinois legislators would need to authorize.

In July, Lightfoot also said she might pursue raising the real estate transfer tax on expensive property sales to help close an enormous 2020 budget hole.

Park told the Tribune layoffs also are on the table.

“Obviously we’re starting looking at the vacancies first but part of this exercise is to look at everything,” Park said.

Park’s hiring freeze memo said departments can proceed with hires if interviews have been scheduled or held and if they’ve already made an offer, pending approval from the budget department and Human Resources.

Departments must submit a list of positions that fall under those exemptions with a justification for consideration to hire someone, Park wrote.

The freeze doesn’t apply to sister agencies like Chicago Public Schools and the CTA as they aren’t part of the city’s budget.

But the hiring freeze also will affect the Police Department, Park said. The city’s August police class just started, but the city is holding back the September batch “until we take a good look,” Park said.

Park plans to talk with police Superintendent Eddie Johnson to “see what that impact is and we’ll make some decisions around that.”

“The city will work to ensure the hiring freeze does not impact police/patrol coverage, and to ensure the freeze doesn’t limit the number of personnel devoted to solving crimes,” the budget department said.

Currently, the Police Department is staffed with about 13,400 officers of all ranks, the largest roster of cops the city has seen since the 2000s.

Its latest surge in police hires began around January 2017 as Johnson and Emanuel were under intense pressure to reverse the rising tide of violence ravaging the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods.

Chicago ended 2016 with more than 760 slayings and over 4,300 people shot, the most violent year the city had seen in two decades. Since then, homicides and shootings have steadily dropped.

The newly minted officers have allowed the department, through promotions of existing officers, to beef up the supervisory ranks and the detective division. Police officials have said this was crucial after the department struggled in recent years with abysmally low rates of solving homicides and nonfatal shootings.

But critics of the hiring surge were bothered that the hundreds of millions of dollars allocated for the effort would make the city too overpoliced and exacerbate the deeply rooted distrust between the police and African American communities. Some say that money could have been better used for economic development, such as neighborhood improvement projects, in those areas.

It’s not unusual for the city to slow its hiring of police officers due to budget challenges.

Police hiring slowed in the final years of Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration and persisted through Emanuel’s first term in office. This also led to less frequent promotions to the detective and supervisory ranks.

In October 2008, Daley’s top cop, Jody Weis, acknowledged the city’s financial strain when he said the Police Department was down about 350 officers from its budgeted strength of about 13,500.

“Some people call it a hiring freeze or a hiring delay, I call it kind of a holding pattern,” he said then.

At that time, he also downplayed the staffing shortage.

“We’re committed to filling those vacancies, but you’ve got to keep in mind we’re still about at 97 1/2 percent strength, and for any organization that’s pretty good,” Weis said.

After Emanuel was elected in 2011, he vowed to add 1,000 officers to the streets. But he drew the ire of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, the Police Department’s largest union, when it became apparent that he ended up merely shifting officers from two shuttered citywide units, and others from desk positions, to beat patrol duties instead of authorizing 1,000 new hires.

“The department manpower, to me, is like Enron accounting … the thousand-person reshuffle,” then-FOP President Michael Shields said at a luncheon that year, comparing Emanuel’s police staffing policy to the now-defunct scandal-plagued energy company.

Several months into Emanuel’s mayoralty, about 1,400 of the roughly 13,500 total positions were vacant and an additional 775 officers were on medical leave. At that time, Emanuel’s police superintendent, Garry McCarthy, resisted calls for more hires when the department, he said, wasn’t “operating at peak efficiency.”

In 2011, the number of homicides was among the city’s lowest in half a century and shootings, and other crimes, also were down.

In the following years, shootings and homicides in the city spiked, dropped and then spiked again as police staffing decreased by September 2016 to about 12,100 — roughly 400 fewer cops than during Daley’s final full year in office.

Budget Committee Chair Ald. Pat Dowell, 3rd, said she didn’t know specifically how Lightfoot planned to roll out or administer the hiring freeze. But she said it makes sense given the city’s financial uncertainty.

“I generally think putting a pin in things until we get a full handle on the budget issues is a good idea,” she said.

Ald. Tom Tunney, 44th, who chairs the Zoning Committee, also said the hiring freeze seems like an appropriate move.

“I know the budget hole is going to be close to $1 billion, so what are the alternatives?” Tunney asked.

But Tunney, who said the Town Hall police district in his ward saw its manpower dip to 333 sworn officers in past years as Emanuel moved beat officers to higher crime neighborhoods before the district rebounded to over 400 officers as hiring increased, doesn’t want to give up those gains because of a Police Department hiring freeze.

“We would want to maintain that sworn officer strength,” Tunney said.

gpratt@chicagotribune.com

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