Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Wednesday inched closer to honoring her 2019 campaign promise to resurrect the full-blown Department of Environment abolished by former Mayor Rahm Emanuel — but not enough to satisfy those demanding more urgent action to combat climate change.
Tucked away in a thick package of amendments to Lightfoot’s $16.4 billion budget is a proposal to beef up the Office of Climate and Environmental Equity — from six employees to 10 — and take those staffers out of the mayor’s office and put them under a director confirmed by the City Council.
The annual budget for the new office would rise from $778,929 to $1.04 million.
That’s not exactly what progressive alderpersons had in mind. But, it’s a start.
“It’s nice to see some movement. But I still don’t think this really meets the urgent of the need in the moment that we’re in. We’ve got this ambitious Climate Action Plan. How are we gonna implement it?” said north lakefront Ald. Maria Hadden (49th).
“We’ve got an election coming up. There’s a real opportunity that she’s got to come through on a campaign promise and meet a real need for the city to reinstate this department. We’ve got a lot of vacancies in other departments. We’ve provided a plan that could help more robustly create a Department of Environment [with] 12 folks, 15 folks. But one of the big pieces was, structurally, the department to fully take on this work.”
Without a full-blown department, the office will not have the “full authority and power to take charge, lead” and make the “tough decisions” needed to combat climate action, Hadden said.
She noted that her ward has lost “one-to-two feet of land with every winter storm from lakefront erosion and high water levels” in Lake Michigan. And that’s just one of the weather-related events now “out of our control,” she said.
“We had our first tornado in August of 2020. We had these early heat waves and lost three residents during the early heat wave because we weren’t prepared. Where’s the guidance on that? And then, we had the citywide flood on Sept. 11. Almost every street in my ward was impacted by this,” she said.
Budget Director Susie Park maintained Wednesday that a “lot of work” needs to be done to “build out a robust” Department of Environment and pull together regulatory authority dispersed to other departments in 2011.
“What you see before you is that first step. We’ve added additional positions from what we originally started with. We are commissioning a study to really look at where all of those roles went. What do we pull back in? And hopefully in 2024, we will come back with a robust department,” Park said.
Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35th) branded Park’s explanation “insulting,” ”disingenuous” and “disrespectful to the people who voted for change.”
To drive home the point, Ramirez-Rosa read aloud mayoral candidate Lori Lightfoot’s Jan. 10, 2019 tweet.
It read, “We’ve got to bring back the Department of Environment to combat climate change and ensure that Chicagoans have clean air to breathe and safe water to drink, no matter their race, economic status or zip code.”
“We’ve had four years to get the Department of Environment done. This was a central piece of a policy platform promised to the people of Chicago. People who wanted to undo the harm caused by eight years of Rahm Emanuel,” Ramirez-Rosa.
“After four years—the fourth budget this mayor will now propose and pass—we have failed. And the ten positions in this office—that’s less than the fifteen in the mayor’s press office.”
Retiring Ald. Susan Sadlowski-Garza (10th) represents a Far Southeast Side ward that’s been used as Chicago’s dumping ground for decades. Garza said Lightfoot promised to resurrect the Department of Environment and, “I really wish you would do that.”
“I don’t want this to be another, like smoke-and-mirrors office that just has meetings with people, does a lot of talking and does nothing,” said Garza, whose ward includes General Iron’s already-built car shredding operation that had its permit denied by Lightfoot.
Even departing Health and Environmental Protection Committee Chairman George Cardenas (12th), Lightfoot’s deputy floor leader, acknowledged the mayor’s concession is “not what I would have preferred.”
“I’ll take incremental change. I’m a patient man. But at some point, this has to be a pivot to that department,” Cardenas said.
He added, “I understand budgetary issues. But environmentalism and environmental protection is key. We should be budgeting it the way our constituency demands.”
