Neighborhoods say funding change deserves more vetting

Above: Neighborhood and Community Engagement Commission Chair Ishmael Israel speaking to the council's health, environment and community engagement committee.

Neighborhood groups said Monday they deserve a fair share of the windfall that is projected in a fund that fuels their operations.

Speaking to a council panel, about 20 advocates for neighborhood groups said the mayor's intention to redirect the funds outside the city's neighborhood department deserves more vetting. The excess funds are the first major test of the city's relationship with its neighborhoods since their funding was brought more under city control in 2011.

"It would be very ironic for this policy shift to happen to the community engagement money without any community engagement," said Jenny Fortman, president of the Sheridan neighborhood organization.

The issue arises out of city projections that a number of special taxing districts will produce at least $14.8 million more over the next five years than originally anticipated in 2011. The districts, established before 1979, include areas like the North Loop and downtown east, which are booming.

Traditionally that money has been earmarked just for the city's 70 neighborhood groups, the city's neighborhood department and paying Target Center debt. But despite the projected growth, neighborhood groups would see just an inflationary increase to their funding in 2015.

The mayor has instead proposed spending $424,000 of next year's excess on closing the city's port and hiring two multilingual communications specialists (see green area below). That annual excess is only expected to grow between now and 2020, when it might near $2 million.

Other neighborhood leaders cited the work they have been able to do on relatively small budgets over the years: Bottineau has established a children's reading program aimed at Somali youth, Windham Park helped create a lending library for tools and Corcoran has identified discrimination against immigrant renters.

"This is not huge amounts of money and it creates an enormous amount of goodwill among the citizenry," said George Jelatis, who served on the board of the now-defunct Neighborhood Revitalization Program. "And it gives citizens a chance to participate in making decisions about things that need to be done in their very local areas."

Council members had mixed feelings about the mayor's plan.

Council Members Lisa Bender and Jacob Frey stressed that neighborhood group funding is still increasing for inflationary reasons in the next budget.

"This is the only department in our entire city where we account for inflationary reasons outside of things that have general commercial flux" like asphalt, Frey said.

"If we're going to invest $250,000 in Upper Harbor, OK then where is the $250,000 for the Midtown Farmers Market site or for Heart of the Beast?" Cano said, referring to two projects in her South Side ward.

The 2011 plan for the money said the definition of what constitutes "neighborhood revitalization purposes" was limited to the city's neighborhood department and funding for neighborhood groups. But it also said the council could change that definition.

Bender said the budget is an appropriate place to determine whether to spend that money in new areas. "We make policy through our budget all the time," Bender said.

Council Member Andrew Johnson responded that none of the changes were outlined in the mayor's actual budget, however.

"Our budget books that we received did not detail out a shift in that funding," Johnson said. "Essentially it did not show that those specific purposes as laid out within this plan were going to be changed, ultimately. So my concern is around transparency and we may have changed policy unknowingly in our city."