Please acknowledge this warm welcome to the Committee on the Budget and Government Operations’ website. As your newly installed Chairman, I look forward to achieving more transparency in this work. It is my vision to simplify your understanding of the Committee’s responsibility to make sound budgetary decisions based on collaborative, expert assessments. The mission at hand is to provide you with data driven analysis and real people capacity.

Furthermore, I hope you will partner in this effort by lending your voices, particularly as we host public meetings geared toward hearing what’s important to you and in your respective community as we enter this budget season and beyond. These insights are what provide us consideration for whether we are staying the course or identify what resources are needed. And along with your input, the Committee is likewise supported by the Office of Budget and Management, Department of Finance, Budget Committee Membership and Council Colleagues, Commissioners and Delegate Agencies, Real World Industry Leaders, and the City Council Office of Financial Analysis (COFA)—who provides an independent fiscal analysis of regulation and reference to drive practical forecasts—to compile a city budget. Those cooperatives jointly afford broader opportunities of view.

I champion increased engagement and reporting that will keep our financial disposition more readily available and beyond annual budget hearings and published works. I embrace the city’s quarterly reconvening to assess where we are and how do we get where we need to be. I want to foster leadership in a direction of reinvesting in economic recovery that addresses present needs, fund more equitable education and job training programs, shape an evolving public safety strategy and a variety of other services overwhelmed by growing demand. Though there may be many challenges, I stand ready to start the conversation, to act, to derive decisions that encourage best practices, to lay a foundation for long-term solutions.

The voters have chosen a more diverse Council to lead us in a new direction. As a change agent, I appreciate new ideas that speak more precisely to present circumstances, that will influence lasting change. I pledge to focus on the ways we efficiently manage and invest in those ideas. I want to combat failing systems, some needing perhaps just a slight tweak. I want to reinvest in making Chicago a city that works for everyone. And I am confident I have the ingenuity and teams that will address the tasks that lie before this Committee. I can’t say the buck stops here, but my undertaking is to eliminate waste and keep an eye on the bottom line. I challenge you join me.

Jason C. Ervin
Chairman, Committee on the Budget and Government Operations