Chicago's Public Safety Administration cost city more money than saved, BGA finds

CHICAGO (WLS) -- In 2020, the City of Chicago created the Office of Public Safety Administration.

As the Better Government Association describes, Mayor Lori Lightfoot called the new administration a cost saving measure and "a comprehensive plan to strengthen and realign the administrative functions of the Chicago Police Department (CPD), Chicago Fire Department (CFD) and the Office of Emergency Management and Communications (OEMC)." The City Council approved $33.5 million for the department in the 2020 budget.

In its latest analysis, the BGA found the city's Public Safety Administration, or PSA, has cost the city more than it saved.

Click here to read the full analysis. https://www.bettergov.org/news/budget-analysis-chicago-s-office-of-public-safety-administration-cost-city-more-than-it-saved/

The following is the city's response to the report;

The Better Government Association's (BGA) article on August 23, 2022, regarding the Public Safety Administration was inaccurate. The article focused on increases between two years of budgets; FY19 and FY22 without understanding the reasoning behind the increases. Fifty-seven percent of the increase between the two years is attributed to personnel costs, most of which were due to the settling of the FOP and Local 2 contracts. This data point should have been removed or clearly noted.

The remaining 43% of the increase were for non-personnel costs which include:

Ongoing carryover of grant funds for public safety departments into the FY22 budget of around $94M;

Shifting the practice of budgeting for settlements and judgements to individual departmental budgets that were previously paid for using other funds and debt service, for public safety, this resulted in an increase from FY19 to FY22 of approximately $57M;

Accounting for the consent decree and associated costs in the FY22 budget for approximately $10M; and,

Implementation the new Computer Aided Dispatch for 911, with substantial milestones of approximately $23M budgeted in FY22. Any discussion on differences in the public safety budgets must account for a project of this magnitude.