Remarkable Civic Genius

The Sunday Night Reader for 5/29/22

May 29, 2022

Above Average

The proposed budget for the city of Champaign for FY22-23 has been posted and will be discussed at meetings in June. It’s available for download here. I never feel perfectly confident reading these documents. This one is 355 pages and would benefit from background knowledge I lack. So I’m open to correction on anything I point out.

That said, the police budget goes from $29.5 million to $34.2 million. Most — but not all — of that increase is a large transfer to the police pension fund, which is likely a smart fiscal move in a year when there is so much federal money being injected and local tax revenues are healthy. Those pensions should be properly supported. The city will also spend just under $1 million on police employee retention payments that were approved recently in an attempt to address hiring woes. These are being paid from city reserves and do not seem to be included in the $34.2 million number.

Some comparison. With the FY22-23 proposal, Champaign would spend about 20 percent of its operating budget ($175 million) on police. That’s $387 per capita. Madison spends about 24 percent of its operating budget on police ($86.6 million of $360.3 million; $334 per capita), Ann Arbor spends 26 percent ($31.2 million of $118.2 million; $258 per capita), Rochester, MN spends nine percent ($33.0 million on $359 million; $282 per capita), and Urbana spends about 19 percent ($12.1 million on $58.7 million; $284 per capita).

In other words, Champaign spends 15 percent more than the average peer city per capita on policing in a typical year and is planning to spend 35 percent more in FY22-23.

Champaign’s public works budget would decrease from $12.3 million to $11.0 million in FY22-23. Neighborhood services, meanwhile, jumps from $1.5 million to $7.6 million. It’s important to note that that increase is almost entirely made up of federal COVID recovery money that has been dedicated to services for people experiencing homelessness — most notably a year-round, low-barrier shelter that will be administered by the township. That $6 million or so will be spent over two years, not all in FY22-23.

The police budget is five times higher than the neighborhood services budget and almost 3.5 times higher than the public works budget. In FY21-22 — when there wasn’t the big transfer to the pensions and there wasn’t a $6 million commitment to housing insecurity programs — the police budget was still not quite three times higher than the public works budget. And the police budget was about 20 times the neighborhood services budget.

I may not be a police abolitionist, but I am a police budget realist.

Eboo!

I knew Eboo Patel a little in college, and it’s been great to watch his advocacy work grow and grow and grow in the years since. He’s one of the good guys and has been since he was 20. His organization, Interfaith America, just announced a giant expansion.

In a Chicago Tribune profile this week, he said: “The only way to have a healthy, religiously diverse democracy is for people who disagree on some fundamental things to work together on other fundamental things, right? It’s a remarkable achievement in human history for people of diverse identities and divergent ideologies to build a nation together, and we think religion has an awful lot to do with that…We in America have this remarkable civic genius where communities of a particular faith build institutions as an expression of their particular faith identity, (and those institutions) serve everybody. I think it is one of the great, never-celebrated geniuses of America…

My vision is that we start calling the United States ‘Interfaith America,’ and not Judeo-Christian, and that becomes just commonplace in five or six years. ‘Judeo-Christian’ did great work, but it doesn’t include atheists or Zoroastrians, it doesn’t include Muslims or Jains, it doesn’t include B’hais or Buddhists. And we have to. We have to.” Read more.

Burning Boy

Paul Auster discusses Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage guy, who’s been dead for 120 years) in this interview. It’s interesting from a creative perspective, but it’s even more interesting from a media perspective. Crane was a journalist, novelist, and essayist, and, in his time, the lines between those were thin and nearly invisible. Telling you to listen to this, I’m not arguing that we should go back to a world where the newspaper publishes articles in which a reporter never asks a question and invents composite characters. I am arguing that the rules of reporting change, and we don’t have to be forever bound to our current, not-up-to-the-challenge journalistic standards of how to get at the truth in public spaces.

How it is is not how it’s always been. Nor is it how it always has to be. Listen to the interview.