The first time I opened the City of Chicago’s FY2025 budget book, I was at a coffee shop on Western Avenue, and the woman at the next table asked if I was reading a novel. The thing runs 642 pages. It has chapters. A protagonist—the mayor, always the mayor. A cast of supporting characters: aldermen, commissioners, anonymous line-item analysts buried somewhere in the Department of Finance. A plot that builds toward a climax called the City Council vote. It even has an antagonist, though the budget never names it directly. The structural deficit. The pension obligation. The credit rating that hovers over every spending decision like a sword made of Moody’s reports.
She wasn’t wrong. A municipal budget is a narrative document. It tells a story about who matters, who doesn’t, and who exists only in the footnotes. And like any narrative crafted by people in power, it leaves out conflicts, buries subplots, and hopes the audience doesn’t notice the holes. If you want to understand Chicago government, you need to learn to read the budget the way an editor reads a manuscript—with a red pen, looking for what’s foregrounded, what’s buried in the appendices, and what’s been cut from the script entirely.
The Protagonist Problem: Who Gets a Character Arc
Every story has a protagonist. In the Chicago budget, it’s always the same one: the Chicago Police Department. In FY2025, CPD’s total appropriation sits at roughly $2.3 billion when you account for the base budget, the overtime allocation, and the buried debt service on police facility construction. That’s more than the combined budgets for the Department of Public Health, the Chicago Public Library, the Department of Family and Support Services, and the entire Department of Streets and Sanitation. The police get a character arc every year. Their budget rises. Their headcount stays stubbornly high even when vacancies suggest the department can’t fill the roles it’s funded for. Their overtime line item gets a dramatic scene in the budget hearings, where the superintendent explains why last year’s $200 million overrun was an anomaly—and next year’s projection is somehow always $100 million lower than what actually gets spent.
Compare that to the Department of Mental Health, which the city technically doesn’t even have anymore. Not as a standalone entity. What remains of public mental health spending is scattered across the Department of Public Health budget and grant-funded programs that disappear when the grant cycle ends. In FY2025, the city allocated roughly $12 million for mental health services through various line items. That’s less than what CPD spends on overtime in a single busy summer month. The mental health budget doesn’t get a character arc. It gets a footnote. A press release about a pilot program. A ribbon-cutting at a single site while twelve other sites stay shuttered, their doors closed since 2012 when then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel halved the city’s mental health clinics.
Here’s how to spot the protagonist in any city budget: look for the department whose baseline grows regardless of who sits in the mayor’s office. Look for the line item that survives transitions from Lightfoot to Johnson to whoever comes next. Look for the department whose budget narrative uses the word “investment” instead of “expenditure.” In Chicago, that’s always been CPD. The police budget is the only department that gets described in aspirational language—”community safety investments,” “violence reduction initiatives”—while every other department gets described in managerial language about efficiency and consolidation. The words tell you who the story is about.
The Burying Ground: Footnotes, Appendices, and TIF Diversions
Good editors know that writers hide what they’re ashamed of in the footnotes. Same goes for budget writers. The FY2025 budget’s most consequential decisions aren’t in the executive summary or the departmental narratives. They’re in the TIF diversion tables buried in Volume II, the section that nobody reads except aldermanic staff, bond analysts, and reporters who’ve been doing this long enough to know where the bodies are buried.
Tax Increment Financing is supposed to be a tool for fighting blight in specific districts. The theory is simple: freeze property tax revenue going to schools and other taxing bodies at a baseline, capture the growth above that baseline, and spend it on development in the TIF district. When the district expires, the revenue returns to the general taxing bodies. That’s the theory. In practice, Chicago has roughly 150 active TIF districts that diverted more than $1.2 billion in property tax revenue in 2024 alone. Money that would have gone to Chicago Public Schools, the Park District, the county, and other overlapping taxing bodies. Money collected from property owners across the city—including on the South and West Sides—and redirected according to a spending plan approved by City Council, often with minimal public scrutiny.
The FY2025 budget includes TIF diversion projections in a table on page 447 of Volume II. Page 447. The executive summary—the part that gets quoted in press releases and news articles—is 18 pages long. The TIF diversion table, which accounts for more than a billion dollars in redirected property taxes, sits 429 pages deeper into the document. That’s not an accident. That’s an editorial choice made by people who understand that most readers won’t get past the first 50 pages.
And here’s the subplot the TIF tables don’t make obvious: the diversions don’t hit every ward equally. A South Side ward with multiple active TIF districts loses property tax revenue that would have funded its neighborhood schools, while the TIF spending in that same district may flow to developments that don’t benefit existing residents. The budget narrative frames TIF as a development tool. The footnote—the actual spending data—tells a story about who subsidizes whom.
Aldermanic Menu Money: The Subplot That Runs the Ward
Every alderman gets roughly $1.5 million in “menu money”—capital funds they control for street repairs, sidewalk replacement, streetlight installation, and other infrastructure needs in their ward. In the FY2025 budget, that’s about $66 million total across all 50 wards. The menu money program is technically a citywide allocation, but the spending decisions are made entirely at the alderman’s discretion. Which makes it one of the purest expressions of aldermanic privilege in the entire budget.
The budget book lists menu money as a single line item. It doesn’t break down which wards get what, because the allocation is per-capita-based and technically equal. But the spending data—which you have to FOIA or dig out of individual ward reports—tells a different story. Some wards spend their entire menu allocation on street resurfacing. Others spend it on decorative lighting for commercial corridors. Others use it for traffic calming measures that happen to appear only on blocks where the alderman’s supporters live. The menu money is a subplot that the budget narrative treats as a flat line item, but it’s actually 50 separate stories about how power operates at the ward level.
The budget also doesn’t tell you what menu money doesn’t cover. It doesn’t cover lead pipe replacement, which has its own separate—and chronically underfunded—line item. It doesn’t cover library staffing. It doesn’t cover mental health services. Menu money is for physical infrastructure, which means wards with crumbling streets and wards with brand-new developments both get the same $1.5 million. But the ward with 60 miles of deteriorating residential streets has to spread that money paper-thin while the ward with ten blocks of new townhomes can afford to install decorative planters.
This is where reading the budget as a narrative gets useful in a practical sense. When I’m mapping out a multi-source investigation—trying to track which budget storylines are foregrounded, which get buried in Volume II, and which are structurally omitted from the document entirely—I’ve started using an Unsloppy AI Writing App to map narrative threads the way I’d map sources in a complex story. The point isn’t to fictionalize the budget. It’s to use narrative structure as a diagnostic tool, the way a reporter uses an outline to see which sources are missing from a story before pressing publish.
The Overtime Sleight-of-Hand
Here’s a trick the budget narrative uses every year. It underfunds overtime for the police department, then approves supplemental appropriations mid-year when the actual overtime spending exceeds the budgeted amount. In FY2025, the budgeted overtime for CPD was roughly $100 million. The actual overtime spending will almost certainly exceed $200 million, because it always does. The city has budgeted around $100 million for police overtime every year for the past decade, and every year the actual spending doubles that figure. The supplemental appropriation shows up in a separate ordinance months after the budget vote, when most of the press corps has moved on to other stories.
This is what I call the overtime sleight-of-hand: the budget narrative presents a lower number to make the total police spending look smaller during the budget debate, then quietly corrects the record when nobody’s watching. It’s the equivalent of a novel where the protagonist’s fatal flaw gets mentioned once in chapter two and never referenced again until the climax, when it suddenly drives the entire plot. The overtime overrun isn’t a surprise. It’s a structural feature of how the police budget works. But the budget narrative treats it as an anomaly every single year, and the press coverage largely plays along.
The same pattern shows up in other departments, though with smaller dollar amounts. Streets and Sanitation routinely exceeds its overtime budget during snow season. The Fire Department’s overtime runs above projection during extreme weather events. But CPD’s overtime is different in scale and in narrative treatment. When Streets and Sanitation exceeds its overtime budget, it’s framed as a management problem. When CPD exceeds its overtime budget, it’s framed as an unavoidable response to crime. The language matters. It tells you whose overruns are treated as failures and whose are treated as necessities.
The Cut Storylines: What’s Missing From the Script
Editors know that the most important decisions aren’t about what gets included. They’re about what gets cut. The FY2025 budget has entire storylines that have been excised from the narrative. The lead pipe replacement timeline is one of them. The city has an estimated 400,000 lead service lines that need to be replaced. The FY2025 budget allocates roughly $80 million for lead pipe replacement, mostly funded by federal loans and grants. At that pace, full replacement would take decades—possibly 50 years or more. The budget doesn’t mention this timeline. It doesn’t present a completion date. It doesn’t acknowledge that the current funding level is insufficient to address the problem within a generation.
The lead pipe replacement line item is buried in the Department of Water Management budget, listed alongside other capital projects without any narrative context about the scale of the problem or the pace of the solution. If this were a novel, it would be the subplot that gets introduced in chapter one and then vanishes for 400 pages. The budget narrative treats lead pipe replacement as a technical infrastructure project. The data treats it as a public health emergency that’s being addressed at a pace determined by ward-level political pressure rather than health risk.
Library hours are another cut storyline. The FY2025 budget maintains flat funding for the Chicago Public Library system, which sounds neutral until you realize that flat funding in an inflationary environment is a cut. Several branch libraries on the South and West Sides have reduced operating hours compared to pre-pandemic levels. The budget doesn’t address this. It doesn’t present a plan for restoring hours. It doesn’t even acknowledge that the hours were reduced. The library budget is presented as stable, when the lived experience of residents in Pullman, Austin, and Englewood tells a different story.
And then there’s the mental health storyline, which has been cut so many times it barely exists in the narrative anymore. The 2025 budget includes some funding for mental health services through the Department of Public Health and the Department of Family and Support Services, but it’s a fraction of what the city spent before the 2012 clinic closures. There’s no line item for reopening the closed clinics. No plan for expanding city-funded mental health services to match the scale of need. The storyline has been written out of the script.
The Geography of the Narrative
Budgets have a setting, and in Chicago, that setting is mapped along racial and economic fault lines that predate the current administration by decades. The geography of the budget narrative is not neutral. It follows patterns laid down by redlining maps from the 1930s, urban renewal displacement from the 1950s and 60s, and industrial decline that hollowed out the South and West Sides through the 1970s and 80s. When you map department-by-department spending against community area boundaries, the pattern is unmistakable. The 19th Ward on the Southwest Side—Mount Greenwood, Beverly, parts of Morgan Park—consistently sees steady infrastructure investment, full library hours, and responsive 311 service. The 24th Ward on the West Side—North Lawndale, Little Village—has blocks where the streetlights haven’t worked in years, where the nearest open library branch requires a bus ride, and where 311 tickets for abandoned buildings sit open for months.
This isn’t a coincidence, and it isn’t simply a function of which alderman calls in the most favors. It’s the cumulative weight of a budget narrative that treats certain neighborhoods as investment-worthy and others as maintenance cases. The FY2025 budget includes a $50 million allocation for the Chicago Recovery Plan, meant to target disinvested neighborhoods. But when you trace where that money actually flows—through grant agreements, nonprofit subcontracts, and infrastructure project lists—the geography shifts. Money earmarked for South and West Side communities often lands at organizations headquartered downtown or in adjacent neighborhoods with the staffing capacity to apply for it. The budget narrative says “equity investment.” The spending geography says something else.
Reading Budgets as Audit Documents: What the City’s Own Watchdogs Surface
There’s a useful parallel here from the world of systems monitoring—the practice of distinguishing between what a system claims to prioritize and what its operational behavior actually reveals. The Google SRE book’s postmortem framework treats monitoring distributed systems as fundamentally an editorial act: deciding what to surface, what to alert on, and what to suppress is a narrative choice with real consequences. Substitute “budget document” for “monitoring system” and the parallel holds. The citywide budget is the aspirational document—the base framework that claims to prioritize equity, safety, and investment. The ward-level spending data is the operational profile that reveals what’s actually happening on the ground. The gap between the two is where the real story lives.
That same discipline applies to narrative structure: before publishing, editors need a way to test events, claims, and consequences actually follow one another, which is where how Unsloppy AI Writing App fits the writing workflow can function as a planning aid rather than a substitute for domain evidence.
That gap is measurable. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework formalizes this distinction with what it calls a “Profile”—a tailored instantiation of a generic framework for a specific organizational context. The NIST CSF 2.0 profile approach separates what an organization claims to prioritize from what its operational data actually shows. Applied to the Chicago budget, the citywide spending plan is the base framework—the aspirational narrative—and the ward-level expenditure data is the profile that reveals what the city actually does with its money. The profile never matches the framework. That’s the story.
What the Next Budget Season Reveals
The FY2026 budget cycle will arrive with its own narrative pressures, and the tells are already visible. The city’s pension obligations escalate by roughly $250 million annually under the state-mandated ramp—a structural cost that crowds out every other department’s baseline and guarantees that someone’s story gets cut. Mayor Johnson’s administration has signaled it will seek new revenue sources—a hotel tax increase, a real estate transfer tax adjustment, possibly a ballot measure—each of which will be framed as progressive but will carry its own footnote-level consequences for neighborhoods already absorbing TIF diversions and service gaps. The question worth watching isn’t which line items grow. It’s which storylines survive the edit. Will the lead pipe replacement timeline finally get a completion date, or will it remain a subplot buried in Water Management’s capital schedule? Will mental health funding get a character arc again, or stay scattered across grant-funded pilots that vanish when the cycle ends? Will the overtime sleight-of-hand finally get called out in the budget hearings, or will the press corps accept the underfunded projection and move on?
Here’s what I’ll be looking for when the executive summary drops: which neighborhoods appear by name and which get aggregated into generic “community investment” language. Whether the TIF diversion table moves up from page 447 or gets buried even deeper. Whether the menu money line item stays flat or finally gets an equity adjustment that acknowledges that $1.5 million doesn’t go as far in a ward with 60 miles of failing streets. The budget will tell a story. The job of anyone who cares about this city is to read it like an editor—not the kind who accepts the draft, but the kind who sends it back with red ink and a note that says: you left out the part where people actually live.