FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
STATEMENT FROM ALD. ANDRE VASQUEZ ON THE RELEASE OF THE MID-YEAR BUDGET REPORT
July 31, 2025
CHICAGO, IL – On July 30th, the Office of Budget Management released the Mid-Year Budget Report, in response to budget transparency reforms Ald. Andre Vasquez submitted to the management ordinance during last year’s budget process.
During the 2025 budget hearings, Ald. Vasquez passed a number of reforms aimed at providing greater transparency, accountability, and oversight to the city’s budget process. Establishing mid-year budget reporting was a key part of these reforms, to ensure city departments stay on track throughout the fiscal year.
“The release of the mid-year Budget Report is a huge step forward toward a more transparent and responsible budget process,” said Ald. Vasquez. “I’m grateful to Budget Director Annette Guzman for her tireless work to make this report happen, and to the Council of Financial Analysis for their analysis.”
While the introduction of mid-year reporting offers a greater level of budget transparency than the public has yet seen, we look forward to building on that success to offer even greater levels of transparency in the future. Specifically, we hope to see the following changes implemented to allow for more transparent data and independent analysis:
- Clear methodology. In future reports, we would like to see a methodology section included at the outset of each section of the report to better understand the basis of and model for calculations used in the analysis. For example, the cost-benefit analysis of special events needs clear grounding in how economic impact is estimated, as well as which services within departments are utilized to further understand costs.
- Increased line item detail. Many datasets are provided in an aggregated format, making it difficult to perform independent analysis or break out crucial line items. For example, we are not able to identify police misconduct settlement line items––a budget line item we know has been over-spent––because of this aggregation, as it does not include a line item for the payment of “Tort and Non-Tort Judgments, Outside Counsel Expenses and Expert Costs as Approved by the Corporation Counsel”. Similarly, we are not able to identify specific revenue sources within larger revenue categories to understand collection patterns.
- Stronger analysis of workforce, vacancy, overtime and turnover. The analysis in these sections does not include the level of detail necessary to understand these crucial parts of our city’s budget, nor do they draw conclusions about reasons for attrition or multi-year vacancies.
- Datasets to allow independent analysis. The majority of the data in the report is only available in PDF format, which makes independent analysis difficult. We hope to see the datasets themselves being made available in a spreadsheet format, to allow for greater independent analysis in the future.
In anticipation of the report’s release, Chair Vasquez’s office has created a mockup of the requested datasets and their formats, for both mid-year reports and other quarterly reports required by the budget transparency reforms. We look forward to working with the OBM to make these tweaks in future reports, so City Council members can be as effective as possible in exercising the appropriate oversight of the city’s budget process.
In addition to these changes, the data in the report also raises questions that are not fully answered by the report.
“We’re thrilled that we were able to get this report as part of our budget transparency reforms, but the additional transparency it provides also raises questions––which is exactly what this report is meant to do,” said Ald. Vasquez. “For example, currently, the city looks to be at a $15 million surplus in personnel costs, but there is no information in the report on where that extra $15 million will go. That level of transparency is important to make sure that we are directing our expenses toward the priorities we have identified as a City Council. We’re also halfway through the year, and yet the spending levels are only at 25% of the city’s total budget for 2025. We need to understand why the spending levels are behind, and what that means for projections for the remainder of the year. These are the kinds of details that we as a City Council need in order for this report to be as effective as it can be.”
In the coming weeks, Ald. Vasquez and other members of City Council will discuss these and other questions with OBM, as well as COFA, whose mid-year budget analysis has also been released. We also anticipate these questions will be discussed during the inaugural Mid-year budget hearings, which we hope will be scheduled in September, as part of the budget transparency reforms Ald. Vasquez passed. We look forward to continuing to communicate what we find out to the public.
“One thing is clear,” said Ald. Vasquez. “After decades of financial mismanagement, Chicagoans need and deserve a transparent budget process. That’s why we passed these budget reforms: so that we would be equipped with the information we need to make more responsible decisions than the generations that came before us. We need this transparency to make better decisions that will lead to better outcomes for all Chicagoans.”
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Questions/media requests: Alison Murphy, 773-999-3319, alison@40thward.org