As Chicago officials warned that the city is facing one of the “most difficult budget years in recent memory,” Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration has yet to detail how much the city spent on employee overtime in 2024. Nor has the city detailed how much it spent on overtime during the first three months of 2025, records show.
In addition, Johnson’s finance team, led by Chief Financial Officer Jill Jaworski and Budget Director Annette Guzman, has yet to account for a $175 million pension payment the city made for Chicago Public Schools employees who are not teachers in the city’s 2024 spending plan. The Chicago Board of Education refused to reimburse the city for that payment, despite the mayor’s repeated requests.
Despite those missing pieces of the city’s financial condition, which could add up to $700 million, officials held the first of four “budget engagement roundtables” designed to gather feedback about the city’s 2026 budget on Saturday in Uptown.
Representatives of Johnson, Guzman and Jaworski did not respond to detailed questions from WTTW News about why the city has yet to disclose how much it spent on overtime in 2024 or how it covered the pension payment for CPS employees, even though 2025 is half over.
More context:
During the first six months of 2024, the city spent $129 million on overtime for members of the Chicago Police Department — nearly 30% more than the total amount set aside by the Chicago City Council as part of the city’s 2024 budget, according to records obtained by WTTW News.
That put the city on pace to spend at least $258 million on police overtime by the end of 2024, even as officials imposed limits on overtime for all city departments, except for police and the Chicago Fire Department, amid a massive budget crunch.
In 2023, the Chicago Police Department spent $293 million on overtime, 40% more than in 2022, records show.
A detailed accounting of the $524 million Chicago spent on overtime for employees in all departments in 2023 was available to the public by mid-March 2024, records show.
That means the city is more than three months behind schedule in providing that data for 2024 to the public, without explanation.
In October, Johnson told WTTW News that he had been unable to reign in overtime spending. |