Airlines to Short City Budget

We'd need the specifics from someone with an accounting degree, but this is a bad development for Daley and his budget hole:

• Airlines will offer almost 3,000 fewer domestic flights a day during the Thanksgiving season, promising fewer choices, fuller planes and higher fares for millions of Americans.
• Compared with last Thanksgiving season, there will be 11 percent fewer flights, 2.6 million fewer seats, on nonstop domestic routes from November 20, the Thursday before Thanksgiving, through November 30, the Sunday afterward.

The Chicago drop in flights is scheduled to be on the order of 13.3% of that 3,000 - almost 400 flights. We don't know what the City garners from airlines, but we seem to recall there are charges for landing fees, gate usage, fuel surcharges, not to mention sales taxes on tickets, food and beverages in and out of the terminals. Hell, there might even be entertainment taxes on in-flight movies.

But we do know that many municipal budgets are based on "revenue projections." The City doesn't have a running balance for the most part and must generate revenue on a continuous basis to maintain payroll, services, and pay expenses. Something like cutting a few hundred flights is going to leave a largish hole in a budget already looking like Swiss cheese. Some other low lights:

• Install red-light cameras at 50 more intersections - we'd love to see what the installation costs are on these cameras (concrete pylons, street wiring, hardware, etc) and then compare the money generated over a years time on a graph. We can testify that we've altered our driving habits and try to leave ten minutes early just so we aren't tempted to rush a yellow light and enrich the mayor by $100. Anyone want to bet tens of thousands of citizens are doing the same thing?
• Increase gun registration fee from $20 to $60 per firearm - more unregistered firearms? Bet on it.
• Raise residential permit parking guest passes from $10 to $20 for a book of 30 - we predict a lot more erasing and fraud to avoid buying guest passes.

That last one is part of a much larger problem. We've heard rumors that parking enforcement is down tens of percentages. Those fines are already listed as projected revenue. So what happens when the police aren't writing as many tickets? Well, first up, we've seen Streets and San supervisors writing tickets. Now we're seeing ticket cams mounted on street sweepers and CTA buses. The mayor has even hired meter maids in the face of a hiring freeze and these people have quotas that must be adhered to so their revenue generation outpaces their salaries paid.

But it's a well known phenomenon that the more you tax or impose fees on something, the less is collected and compliance goes down. Look at the City bottled water tax or the discrepancy in dog licensing fees for neutered versus non. People will do whatever it takes to avoid paying the extra money.