Illustration by Steven Berger
Well, here we go again. It’s budget time in Evanston. The next few months will feature endless debate, countless meetings and surely at least one or two good shouting matches.Things got rolling last week with budget workshops, where Evanston residents met with the mayor, city manager and finance director.
They presented ideas about budget cuts, raising taxes and laying off city employees. They were able to say what they thought was wasteful spending, and what they thought was the best way to solve Evanston’s hulking $8 million budget deficit.
In past years, residents have ranked their preferred services. But nothing happened once the list made it to the city officials responsible for writing the budget, said Vito Brugliera, McCormick ’55, a resident who has long been involved in the budget process. And that can’t happen this year.
I’ve seen it before. Last year, I spent four months covering the final stages of the Downtown Plan. On this project – another that dramatically affected everyone in Evanston – the City Council again asked for citizen input. It went so far as to form a citizens’ commission to advise the city staff and officials regarding the Plan. The commission decided by a 5-3 vote not to approve the Plan – the only majority decision it reached, said Coleen Burrus, who was part of the group and has since become the 9th Ward alderman. Despite this, the Plan was approved by the City Council by a 6-3 vote.
“Why have citizen commissions if you’re going to ignore them?” Burrus asked The Daily in January.
The Downtown Plan was a major issue for the city of Evanston, but this year’s budget is even more important. Every project the City wants to complete, every staff member the city wants to hire and every service the city wants to provide from here on depends entirely on the ability to pass a usable budget. Evanston residents deserve to have a major part in making the decisions.
Brugliera, despite having his opinion ignored in the past, is hopeful this year. He said new City Manager Wally Bobkiewicz is taking positive steps.
“He has requested 100 names of citizens from the council, and he has interviewed so far 90 people,” Brugliera said about Bobkiewicz. “He is taking his own sample, and he is asking people what are the issues.”
I hope Brugliera is right. I hope the council, Bobkiwicz and everyone else involved in the budget process takes the advice they get at the community budget workshops seriously. I hope when they make decisions about raising taxes or cutting services, they take into account the opinions of the people who it affects the most: the residents.
But as I said, I’ve seen it before. I’ve seen the Council take hours for citizen comments at meetings, only to disregard them once it was time to vote. That isn’t acceptable here. If the Council wants citizen input, it has to take it seriously.
Otherwise, why waste everyone’s time?
City editor Ben Geier is a Medill junior. He can be reached at [email protected].
