The clash last year over Chicago’s 2025 budget left many alderpeople with a common complaint about the mayor’s office: They often couldn’t get straight answers on city finance issues, they said. Even when they did, many didn’t trust the numbers.

That’s motivating a renewed push by some City Council members to beef up a city research office most taxpayers have never heard of that could be a key to bringing critical analysis to the city’s budget and big-dollar city financial deals that have a direct impact on residents’ services and tax bills.

Cities like New York, San Diego and Pittsburgh have robust, well-staffed budget analysis offices that comb through mayoral budget proposals and poke holes in flimsy projections. A similar Illinois agency plays a critical role in vetting financial data coming from the governor’s office.

In Chicago, the City Council Office of Financial Analysis has rarely had more than two employees and routinely misses deadlines for the basic reports required of it. It has no guaranteed funding, limited access to data and depends on the mercies of the top city finance officials whose work it’s supposed to analyze and critique.

Now, as the City Council moves to wrest back some control of the city’s spending, it is looking to the watchdog to help light the path after having fought to more than double the office’s tiny staff.

It won’t be easy.

The council faces decades of precedent in which the mayor’s office wields near-total power to craft, negotiate and execute a budget with only a cursory look from alderpeople in the weeks leading up to its passage.

Months after Mayor Brandon Johnson squeezed a controversial $17 billion budget through the City Council and with an even larger deficit looming, critics say the traditional model — in which which the mayor’s staffers write the budget behind closed doors and present their plan to the council in the fall — no longer passes muster.

Bitter public debate also surrounded proposals for billions of dollars in infrastructure borrowing that Johnson pushed through the City Council last spring and earlier this year, as multiple council members questioned his administration’s financial assumptions.

Amid the outcry, the mayor has this year highlighted new efforts to bring alderpeople into a more central budget-making role. Council members say they’re ready for the challenge.

“The way that our budget process has worked for decades is no longer aligned with the needs of residents and the challenges that we need to overcome,” said Ald. Matt Martin (47th), one of about a half-dozen alderpeople pushing for a bigger role in setting the city’s spending plans.

Alderpeople “need to get objective data,” said Janice Oda-Gray, the chief administrative officer of the City Council Office of Financial Analysis, or COFA. “They don’t need to get data … that’s spoon-fed to them.”

Chicago Budget Director Annette Guzman disagreed with the notion that her department only gives alderpeople selective information.

“I support efforts to ensure alders are well-informed and have access to objective, comprehensive information,” Guzman wrote in a statement. “This is why my department … and I continue to engage alders in one-on-one meetings, early briefings, offer detailed budget documents and work to closely collaborate with both COFA and members of City Council throughout the entire budget process.”

The origin of the independent office dates to 2012, when then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel renegotiated the infamous 2008 deal that sold the city’s rights to its parking meter revenue for 75 years. 

Emanuel’s finance officials told alderpeople to trust their savings projections — just as the previous mayor, Richard M. Daley, had done four years earlier, said Ameya Pawar, who served in the council representing the 47th Ward from 2011 to 2019.

“It uncovered for me that the council didn’t have its own office to analyze bond deals, to analyze asset leases … like the parking meter [deal], [tax-increment financing districts] and the annual budget,” Pawar said. “We were, in many ways, reliant upon the city budget office … we just felt that there was a structural gap.”

Pawar joined colleagues to chart out an independent budget office like the internal watchdogs in  San Diego, Pittsburgh and New York City, he said.

It took years for COFA — nested within the council’s budget committee after a protracted dispute over who would oversee it — to settle into a pattern of regular work. Even when it did, it never had more than three full-time staffers and published little.

When Jonathan Silverstein was hired to the office in 2019, he soon became the only employee. He faced the near-impossible task of single-handedly vetting the opaque, pre-baked budget proposals developed by the dozens of finance staffers who worked for the mayor. He noticed almost immediately that the way the administration presented the spending plans hid many programs’ true costs by shuffling them among different departments, or by separating personnel costs from operating budgets. For example, police-related costs like squad car maintenance were categorized under the city’s Department of Fleet and Facilities Management.

“It’s like they’re giving you the information in hieroglyphics, but they’re not giving you a Rosetta Stone,” Silverstein said. The result, he said, was that the City Council often isn’t fully educated on the spending and taxation proposals it’s asked to approve.

Part of the problem, Silverstein added, was that alderpeople often weren’t even curious about the city budget.

Even after a 2019 update in the office’s ordinance that let individual alderpeople request analyses of city finance data, only six such requests were fulfilled and published that year, according to COFA’s website. After Silverstein left the office in 2021, the reports began to dry up, their scopes became narrower, and they contained multiple mistakes. In 2022, Martin requested an analysis of the city’s speed camera revenues and got a one-and-a-half-page memo that parroted city data — and misidentified Martin’s ward.

The office also routinely missed its legal mandates to publish analyses of the mayor’s annual budget forecasts and spending proposals. Even as its production has picked up since Oda-Gray took the reins in 2024, her team has not kept current with analyses of city leases or public-private partnership agreements, which are also required by ordinance.

Keeping up with the requirements has been virtually impossible, Oda-Gray said, given her minimal staffing.

More than a decade after it was established, COFA is a far cry from the models Pawar and his colleagues saw in other cities.

How NYC does it

New York City’s Independent Budget Office was created under the city’s last charter revision in 1989 to prevent a rerun of the 1970s financial crisis that almost drove New York into bankruptcy. It was modeled after the Congressional Budget Office, said Louisa Chafee, who has been the director of the Independent Budget Office since last year.

“The thought was … to have an entity that wasn’t reporting to an elected official report on … the state of the economy, the state of the city’s collection of revenues and the state of what the city intended as expenditures,” Chafee said.

Thirty-six years later, the office has 50 full-time staffers spread across eight divisions, with economists and researchers dedicated to scrutinizing different corners of city government. Staffers are required three times a year to publish an independent analysis of the city’s finances, but the team churns out dozens of reports each year ranging from national economic forecasts to rapid analyses of headline-grabbing policy proposals. 

“Some of our work is very long and complicated, and some is quite quick,” Chafee said. She pointed to a recent report vetting a proposal from New York’s governor to assign more police officers to subway stations. The office also provided data to counter claims from Mayor Eric Adams’ administration about the cost of accepting migrants as the city was reeling from new arrivals in 2023 and 2024, she said.

“We had some fairly animated conversations with the Office of Management and Budget, because we almost immediately discerned that their models of arrivees’ duration in city services, and the types of services, were different than what we were seeing,” Chafee said.

New York’s charter requires the Independent Budget Office to be funded with at least 10% of the funds that are dedicated to the city’s Office of Management and Budget and empowers the director to hire staff. That gives the watchdog free rein to challenge the mayor over financial projections and reporting.

Chicago’s City Council Office of Financial Analysis has no such budget floor.

Unlike other internal oversight agencies in Chicago, the office operates on a spending plan dictated by the finance officials it’s supposed to be overseeing. 

Critics call it an inherent conflict of interest that limits the office’s ability to become effective.

“A budget floor protects an entity from being starved on the vine,” Chicago Inspector General Deborah Witzburg said. “An entity can be legislated into existence and then undermined out of its purpose by being starved of resources.”

By law, Witzburg’s office must be funded with at least 0.14% of the city’s overall budget.

Witzburg’s team is currently auditing COFA, but she declined to discuss details. She said the importance of the budget watchdog is “tremendous.”

“We need look back only, for example, to the parking meter deal to see that a clear and independent analysis of the financial impact of legislation would serve the city very, very well,” Witzburg said.

‘I don’t know if I believe it’

Chicago alderpeople have invoked the parking meter deal multiple times in recent years when sounding alarms over plans floated by the mayor’s administration, whether it was former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s deal with Bally’s Casino or the last two billion-dollar-plus borrowing plans backed by Johnson.

The lack of trust was part of what made it such a struggle for the mayor to wrangle City Council support for his most recent budget proposal, Ald. Matt O’Shea (19th) said.

“Even when you get answers, it’s like … I don’t know if I believe it,” O’Shea said. The Far Southwest Side alderperson said he broached ideas with the mayor’s administration to add revenue, but they were rebuffed. O’Shea was then floored when Johnson’s October budget proposal came with a $300 million property tax increase, which was narrowed then later dropped amid City Council opposition.

The experience led O’Shea to join about a half-dozen council members pushing for deeper and more sustained legislative oversight of the budget process, including by beefing up COFA.

“We want to know … how many employees are in the [Department of] Streets and Sanitation? What are their titles? What are their salaries?” O’Shea said.

He signed onto an ordinance proposed last fall by Ald. Andre Vasquez (40th) that would have compelled the city’s Office of Budget and Management to open its books to the City Council, including by sharing the funding requests each city department sends the budget office each spring and summer. The ordinance also would have mandated a budget floor for COFA, at 20% of that of the mayor’s budget office.

“I would like it to function like an independent budget office,” Vasquez said of the small team, adding that he hopes it disrupts the existing dynamic where challenging voices are pushed away from the budget making process. “It’s having the kind of body … that doesn’t think about that calculation, and just says, ‘Here’s what the math says.’”

Johnson’s administration rejected Vasquez’s proposal. 

Guzman, who leads the budget department, noted COFA is already allowed under city ordinance to request budget data from departments and to view all city budget, financial and procurement data.

“My ideal vision for COFA’s role is that it functions as a fully independent, objective financial office that provides thorough, data-driven analysis to support City Council members in making informed fiscal decisions,” Guzman wrote in her statement. “That vision is already reflected in the authority granted to COFA under the Municipal Code — and we believe that adhering to this mandate would help strengthen trust and transparency across the board.”

As a compromise, the mayor’s office agreed to add three staffers to COFA.

Finance officials also pledged to publish reports on the state of the city’s finances and staffing in July, before traditional budget hearings get underway, and hold a public hearing to discuss them. 

The extended process will run parallel with a new working group launched by Johnson last month to craft a longer-term budget plan and “chart a path for fiscal sustainability,” according to a news release. Johnson also sent letters to alderpeople this month inviting them to monthly meetings that budget officials plan to host between April and September.

Oda-Gray said she hopes the three added staffers will bring the office to a level of productivity it hasn’t achieved in its decade-long history. She is hiring a data analyst, a researcher-writer and a municipal finance expert.

Her team has also been trained this year on software that will allow the group to see the budget department’s internal data instead of relying on the polished reports that are released to the public.  

“When we get that small team together, that synergy should position us where we can support the City Council and be proactive in answering their questions,” Oda-Gray said.

Oda-Gray’s team will be responsible for a report on the city’s finances timed with the mid-year budget report due from city budget officials in July. Alderpeople say it will be a critical test of the oversight office’s new muscle.

“I view all these things as a work in progress … we’re building the infrastructure and the training wheels for the council to be more thoughtful, earlier on,” Vasquez said. “I think it helps train the council to be more of a legislative branch and to think about our fiscal responsibilities, more than just being service providers.”

COFA won’t become as productive or essential as New York’s Independent Budget Office overnight. It could take 20 staffers for the office to fulfill its true potential, Oda-Gray said.

But she did promise the office would fulfill its mission of  independent oversight.

“COFA is not here to align with the mayor or anyone else,” Oda-Gray said. “COFA is here to give independent, objective information. It doesn’t even matter what I think — it’s a matter of giving the information, sourcing the data and having it accurate.”