The $537,000-a-year office created in 2014 to advise the City Council on financial issues and avoid a repeat of the parking meter fiasco has failed to deliver on that mission, the city’s chief watchdog said Tuesday.
Days before concluding her four-year term, Inspector General Deborah Witzburg said a shortage of both adequate staff and financial information closely held by the mayor’s office prevents the Council’s Office of Financial Analysis from helping the Council be the the “co-equal branch of government” it aspires to be.
In a budget rebellion not seen since “Council Wars” in the 1980’s, a majority of alderpersons led by conservative and moderate Democrats rejected Mayor Brandon Johnson’s corporate head tax and approved an alternative budget, including several revenue-generating items the mayor’s adamantly opposed.
But Witzburg said the renegades would have been in an even better position to challenge Johnson if only their financial analysis office had been “equipped and positioned to do what it’s supposed to do” — provide the Council with “objective, independent financial analysis.”
“We are entering new territory where the City Council is asserting new, independent authority over the budget process. It can’t do that in a meaningful way without its own access to financial analysis,” Witzburg told the Sun-Times.
But the Council’s financial analysis office, she added, “has never been equipped or positioned to do what it needs to do. It needs better and more independent access to data and it needs enough staff to do its job. It has a small number of employees and comparatively limited access to data.”
The IG’s farewell audit examined the period from 2015 through 2023. During that time, the financial analysis office budget authorized “either three or four” full-time employees. It now has a staff of five .
Witzburg is recommending a staffing analysis to identify how many people the financial office really needs — and also recommending that the office “get data directly” from other city departments, “ rather than having it go through the mayor’s office.”
The audit further recommends that the office develop “better procedures to meet their reporting requirements” in a timely manner. As it stands now, reports are delivered “sometimes late, sometimes not at all,” the inspector general said.
“We find that those reports have been both not timely and not complete in terms of what they are required to report on and that those reports therefore have provided limited assistance to the City Council in its responsibility to make decisions about the city’s budget,” she said.
The Council Office of Financial Analysis responded to the audit by saying it hopes to add at least three full-time staffers in the short-term and has made “some progress” over the last three years in improving their access to data, but not enough.
The office was created in 2014 to provide aldermen with expert advice on fiscal issues.
For nearly two years the reform was stuck in the mud over whether former Ald. Helen Shiller (46th) had the independence and policy expertise to lead the office.
Shiller ultimately withdrew her name, but the office was a bust nevertheless. In an attempt to breathe new life into it, sponsors pushed through a series of changes.
Instead of allowing the Budget chair alone to request a financial analysis on a proposal impacting the city budget, any alderman was allowed to make that request.
The office was further required to produce activity reports quarterly, not just annually.
Now former-Budget Chair Pat Dowell (3rd) then chose Kenneth Williams Sr., a former analyst for the office, as director and gave him the “autonomy” the ordinance demanded.
Two years ago, a bizarre stand-off developed in the office.
Budget Committee Chair Jason Ervin (28th) was empowered to dump Williams after Williams refused to leave to make way for a director of Ervin’s own choosing.
The stand-off began when Williams said he was summoned to Ervin’s office and told the newly-appointed Budget chair was “going in a different direction and I’m putting you on administrative leave” with pay.
“He took all my credentials and access away. I would love to come to work. I wasn’t allowed to come to work,” Williams said then.
Williams collected a paycheck for doing nothing while serving out the final days remainder of a four-year term.
Ervin’s resolution stated the director “may be removed at any time with or without cause by a two-thirds” vote or 34 alderpersons. He chose Janice Oda-Gray, who remains chief administrator.
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