Mayor Rahm Emanuel vowed Friday to make the tough choices Chicago has avoided for a decade — without raising taxes, cutting police or using one-time revenues — to erase a $635.7 million budget shortfall that will rise to $790 million by 2014.
“We have come to that moment of truth as a city. We now must make the tough choices to deal with that [in] a structural and fundamental way,” Emanuel said.
The bleak outlook in the new mayor’s preliminary 2012 budget and three-year financial forecast will require fundamental changes in the way the city delivers services and elimination of other functions.
We had no idea that Rahm was going to put 400 or so recruits through the Academy before the end of this year. Because that's a ballpark figure on the number of retirees going into December. The number of recruits currently in the Academy is in the neighborhood of zero, so just via attrition, we're down 400 this year, and almost as many last year, and the year before that.
Is anyone in the media going to call bullshit on Rahm any time soon? He has the Department deploy officers already on the streets back to those very same streets and claims it's an increase of 500, 50 recruits come off their probationary period on the streets and he claims they are redeployed to the streets, now he's promising no police cuts while there are no recruits in the pipeline and the ones that might be there by September aren't coming out until April. It's a slam dunk story, but the media has forgotten how to play ball.
Is anyone in the media going to call bullshit on Rahm any time soon? He has the Department deploy officers already on the streets back to those very same streets and claims it's an increase of 500, 50 recruits come off their probationary period on the streets and he claims they are redeployed to the streets, now he's promising no police cuts while there are no recruits in the pipeline and the ones that might be there by September aren't coming out until April. It's a slam dunk story, but the media has forgotten how to play ball.