With City of Chicago hiring freeze, what about executive-level jobs in Mayor’s office?

CHICAGO (CBS) — A day after the City of Chicago announced a hiring freeze on account of a significant budget deficit, CBS News Chicago took a closer look at existing positions at City Hall.

It turns out Mayor Brandon Johnson has more executive-level staff than other recent mayors. There are more city staffers with job titles such as chief, director, or officer in City Hall now than were seen during the administration of Mayor Lori Lightfoot or Mayor Rahm Emanuel before her.

The city said it projects running a $222.9 million deficit at the end of the current fiscal year and then a $982 million shortfall in 2025 thanks to personnel costs, drops in some key tax revenues, and expiring one-time budget solutions Mayor Johnson relied on for 2024. The announcement of the citywide hiring freeze came as no surprise to Joe Ferguson, president of the Civic Federation.

“Oh good God, no,” Ferguson said. “We’ve been there before.”

Before taking over as president of the nonpartisan watchdog group after the passing of longtime Civic Federation President Laurence Msall, Ferguson was the Chicago Inspector General under three different mayors. He said the last time the response to a budget crisis was so dire was when Richard M. Daley was still mayor.

“We have not seen a situation quite this serious that has prompted a quite so serious response since the time of the Great Recession, when the mortgage market collapsed,” he said.

As for whether a freeze like this will really save the city money, Ferguson expressed some doubt.

“You don’t save a lot of money,” he said, “and the fact of the matter is—in less dramatic fashion—in many years, governments at all levels, but including the city, have kind of a soft hiring freeze fourth quarter of the fiscal year.”

But still, it is unclear exactly where the hiring freeze will apply.

On Monday, Ald. Jason Ervin (28th), chair of the City Council Budget Committee, said, “The freeze as announced today only impacts the City of Chicago.”

Ervin explained that there will be no impact for the Chicago Transit Authority, Chicago Public Schools or the Chicago Park District—and most Chicago police and fire jobs will not be subject to the freeze, especially those on the street.

But what about open positions in the Mayor’s office?

Sydney Holman, the Deputy Mayor of Intergovernmental Affairs just resigned her $189,000-a-year job. Some of her team also left.

Will the freeze apply to those positions? Late Monday, CBS News Chicago was still waiting for the Mayor’s office to answer that question.

In the meantime, public records requests have revealed the Johnson administration is spending $12,250,500 on salaries in the Mayor’s office alone—and out of that, $5,295,952 on 28 executive-level positions.

Johnson has created least three more of those higher-paid positions in his time as mayor compared with Mayor Lightfoot, who had 25. Mayor Emanuel had 16.

Could some of those positions go? CBS News Chicago is waiting for the Mayor’s office to answer that question, too.

“That’s sort of the trip wire into the larger question of how many other management-level positions do we have in the city?” said Ferguson. “And what we have is a really fat mid-management, middle-level of management in the city, and there has never been a meaningful endeavor to actually analyze that and figure out what we don’t need.”

CBS News Chicago reached the Mayor’s office and the city’s budget director with interview requests Tuesday morning and followed up early in the afternoon with detailed requests for information. As of late afternoon, CBS News Chicago was still waiting on responses.