Council members appear open to expenditure cuts and new revenue sources — including property tax hike

Evanston City Manager Luke Stowe has made it easy enough for the City Council to skate by without major changes this budget season, proposing a $342 million budget for 2025 that doesn’t include any new taxes and uses $12.5 million in reserves and one-time revenues — the federal pandemic-relief funds the city received from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and $12 million in Northwestern stadium permit fees — to largely balance income and expenses.

Council members signaled during their first full-fledged budget discussion at an Oct. 14 meeting, though, that they intend to go further than that, heeding warnings from staff that reserves, now a healthy $52 million, will fall below the city’s recommended minimum as soon as the 2026 budget year.

The ARPA money and stadium permit revenue would have dried up by then, too.

“It’s going to have to get dealt with eventually. The longer we wait, the worse it’s going to get,” said Mayor Daniel Biss, starting off discussion at the Oct. 14 meeting. “It’s not a problem that’s going to be solved by appealing to magic fairy dust and just finding, ‘Oh, what a fortunate thing that there’s that $12 million line item of abuse and waste and fraud in the budget that we’re going to cut out now and fix everything.’”

Rather, council members will “have to make a whole bunch of hard choices,” he said, “and those choices will be just that much harder next year if we kick the can down the road one more year.”

Community members will have a chance to participate in the process, too. A public hearing on the budget is scheduled for 6 p.m. Monday, Oct. 28 in the City Council chambers at the Morton Civic Center, 2100 Ridge Ave.

‘Menu of options’ to look into

Meanwhile city staff have helped set the stage by suggesting a “menu of options” that council members might consider to help balance the 2025 budget.

Those options include doubling the plastic bag tax, instituting a city-wide parking meter hike, considering a recreation center parking garage for non-residents and increasing the property tax.

By my count, there were 39 suggestions from staff,” Fourth Ward Council Member Jonathan Nieuwsma said at the Oct. 14 meeting. “My take of those 39 options — nine would get strong support, 13 were maybe, 15 were probably not and two were definitely not.

“We’ve got a fund balance this year, looks like we’re going to have one next year,” he continued, “but as you [staff] showed so starkly … that fund balance isn’t going to be here three years from now , so we’re going to have to either increase revenues significantly or cut costs significantly, not just by trimming here and there, but by using an ax rather than a scalpel.”

Take out your own trash — literally

Council Member Devon Reid (8th Ward), who led council members last year in suggesting the most alternative revenue sources for balancing the budget, has another one this time that’s probably a lock to win “most outside the box” honors.

“As far as cutting expenses, I think it’s about time in the next few years to evaluate the way that we collect trash,” he said. “It sounds kind of out of the norm, at least here in America, at least here in Illinois, but if you look at other jurisdictions across the United States, particularly rural, not everyone sends a trash collector to everyone’s house to pick up the trash that they [the occupants] brought to their house. In a number of European countries, there are centralized stations within neighborhoods where folks who brought the trash to their house themselves, then take the trash themselves to a more centralized location.”

Reid estimated the city is paying $7 million a year for trash collection services currently, with the cost of infrastructure driving that cost up to $10 million annually. He estimated the change to such a centralized system, without individual collection for every household, could save the city $4 million annually once an initial investment is made.