On Monday, November 8, City Council voted to approve the 2023 Budget, which included many good investments for our city. The budget passed 30 - 18. I was one of the 18 'No' votes. Each year, the budget decision is an opportunity to define priorities and make adjustments to our planned investments for the coming year. We spend weeks reviewing the proposal, hearing from departments, and working with colleagues to make amendments and adjustments to create a final budget that meets the needs for our constituents.

Going into this budget, we used information from our community budget survey and firsthand knowledge of constituent requests and ward issues to determine what priorities I should focus on in the budget. Those priorities were creating a department of environment, mental health services, violence prevention, and support for homelessness prevention and outreach. These were priorities I took with me to budget hearings as well as to the Chicago Progressive Caucus and Aldermanic Black Caucus.

Violence Prevention
We started from a good place on violence prevention funding as we still have the $80M+ of recovery funds committed to it. The frustration I and others expressed during hearings was that this is the number one issue for our city and we've only moved about 18% of the funds out the door. The Dept. of Public Health was not well prepared to give us explanations as to why we're taking so long and couldn't provide us with the relevant data to demonstrate how our funds are making a difference.

Mental Health Services
Our Treatment Not Trauma efforts won additional clinician positions in the 2022 budget, unfortunately, many of those positions still go unfilled. The mental health crisis response teams using the co-responder model won't be expanded in 2023, leaving 18 or our 22 police districts without an alternative response model. And lastly, the promise to bring more services to our communities through public clinics is still unfulfilled.

Homelessness Prevention
This one area where we've seen great progress in this budget. Not only is it one of the only areas where recovery funds have been nearly 100% allocated, but I was also able to get 5 additional positions for the homelessness team in the Department of Family Support Services as well as an additional $4M in funds for rapid rehousing units bringing the total budget for 2023 from 800 to 1,200. This is the number one investment that our department needed to help get more of our unsheltered neighbors housed.

Department of Environment
For three years, I have been advocating for this department along with several other alderpersons. In our ward, we know all too well the need for a City department to lead the way in helping our city adjust and plan for the impacts of climate change. In just the last 3 years, we've experienced the devastating lakefront erosion we saw in the 2019-2020 winter season which claimed 1-2ft of land with each storm, a tornado that ripped through 1/4 mile of our ward, the tragic deaths of three women in a senior building because of an early heatwave and a lack of air conditioning, and the widespread damage from a 60-year flood that left practically no building untouched in our ward. We know that we need proactive planning and coordination that only a department can provide. We also provided a plan that was feasible and possible to create this year, but the administration decided against it.

I voted against this budget because we have a responsibility to do better for our residents. Even with the progress we saw, this budget could have and should have gone further. These issues are all urgent, and we should be moving in full coordination to address them. I look forward to continuing to work with colleagues, community and advocates around the city to make gains on these issues because they require our urgent attention and taking no for an answer is not an option.