The main thing you need to know about Mayor Emanuel’s recent comments on marijuana and the city budget is that most if not everything he said was false.
To demonstrate his resolve, our chief executive looked directly into the camera and—as if he’d been up all night rehearsing his lines—sternly said: “I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t inhale and never tried it again.”
As I’ve discussed before, budgets are annual projections, made in the fall, in which the mayor anticipates how much money he expects to bring in and how much he plans to spend in the coming year.
Obviously, those enhancements and savings didn’t work out so well, because in February the mayor asked the City Council to sign off on borrowing about $1 billion more.
There are other gimmicks used to help balance budgets, such as the sleight of hand that Mayor Emanuel’s school board appointees pulled last month when they “balanced” their budget by adding two months to the fiscal year. That means they’ll be using next year’s taxes to pay this year’s bills.
And let’s not forget that in each of the last two years the Chicago Public Schools jacked up the property tax to the maximum level allowed by law. The only way the mayor can claim to have held the line on property taxes is by pretending he has nothing to do with the tax hikes passed by his appointees on the school board.
