CHICAGO – Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot today was joined by members of the transition team, the community, advocacy organizations, elected officials and her cabinet for an event and panel discussion to reflect on the first 100 days in office and discuss the next steps it will take to address key priorities facing the city.

The new administration has championed landmark legislation to benefit working families and has worked to bring forward new investments in public safety, education and good governance reforms designed to make the city more efficient for the residents it serves.

During the event held at Kenwood Academy, Mayor Lightfoot thanked members of the transition team and the community for their contributions to ensuring a successful transition and outlined some of the key challenges the administration will take on next to continue driving change to benefit residents and businesses across the City of Chicago.

“Over these past 100 days, we have made important strides in building stronger communities, safer neighborhoods, and creating meaningful change across Chicago, but our work has only just begun,” said Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot. “I want to thank all our residents, community leaders, elected officials, and other stakeholders for their collaboration, partnership, and support in enacting historic legislation and unprecedented reforms for our city. In the months ahead, we must continue to stand together as we build on our success and take on even greater challenges to create a Chicago that is truly a beacon of hope and opportunity for every resident, and for generations to come.”

Thus far, the administration has focused on addressing some of the biggest challenges and opportunities facing Chicagoans – including passing unprecedented reforms to make city government more transparent, directing equity-focused investment in schools and instilling regulations to generate fairness in communities and workplaces.

These efforts have advanced through stronger collaboration between the city and a broad range of stakeholders, bringing new voices and ideas to the table. Key highlights from the first hundred days include:

• Creation of a multifaceted comprehensive crime-fighting strategy centered on unprecedented citywide coordination that has resulted in nearly 7,000 guns recovered year-to-date, a three-year low in murders, shooting incidents at their lowest count since 2015 and 20-year lows in robberies, burglaries and motor vehicle thefts.
• Directing a significant expansion of school staffing and resources, including an unprecedented equity-focused budget, commitment to increasing social worker, nurse and special education case manager positions, and one of the largest capital budgets in recent history with investments to upgrade classrooms and facilities at over 300 schools across the city in 2020.
• Passing the most comprehensive worker scheduling law in the nation that will finally give lower-wage workers and their families predictability in scheduling and fairer working conditions.
• Begun reforming an historically regressive fines and fees system in order to help people move into payment plans and compliance, instead of into bankruptcy.
• Overhauling the workers’ compensation program to improve benefits to workers and reduce liability and claims costs to the city.
• Achieving passage of a series of ethics and good governance reforms to ensure the City operates more efficiently, transparently and in a way that is accountable to all residents and taxpayers.
• Doubling down on protections for immigrant and refugee families by issuing an executive order to terminate ICE access to citywide databases and city facilities, increasing legal aid funding by $250,000, and uniting with community and business leaders to address fears in the wake of threats.
• Working with partners to secure authorization on a Chicago casino, and taking additional steps toward creating a long-term sustainable financial plan for the City.
• Creating the City’s first-ever Office of Racial Justice and Equity to oversee the development of policies and practices to advance racial and social equity for the City.
• Creating the City’s first Chief Risk Officer position, which will focus on launching an enterprise risk management system to reduce the cost of legal settlements to the City.
• Beginning steps toward a comprehensive redevelopment strategy to tackle years of disinvestment on the City’s South and West sides, including creating a coalition of over 40 business leaders to participate in a corridor reinvestment strategy.
• Launching a new and improved Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP) which for the first time makes explicit collaboration with the Continuum of Care, resulting in a coordinated application process for addressing homelessness.

Moving forward, some of the next key priorities for the Lightfoot administration include addressing the FY2020 budget and the City’s long term fiscal health, expanding access to mental health and trauma services in every neighborhood, creating broader access to affordable housing, and passing a $15 minimum wage to further benefits for working families.

The Mayor has announced she will lead four budget town hall meetings throughout the city to ensure residents have an opportunity to learn more about the budget process, the upcoming 2020 budget, and ways the City will address its financial challenges. To give the Budget Town Hall meetings a framework of the topics residents want to discuss, the City is launching a new public survey at www.chicago.gov/2020budget

Now through September 30^th, the survey will act as a tool for the administration to ascertain which priorities residents want to focus on over the course of the discussion.

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