Aurora’s proposed 2026 budget, which includes controversial staffing cuts to public safety departments, is heading towards final approval by the City Council on Tuesday.
The city is proposing a $680.8 million budget for 2026, which is $78.8 million less than this year’s. While most of the year-to-year change could be attributed to a one-time increase in revenue from bonds the city took out this year for big construction projects, the general operating fund proposed for 2026 also saw cuts, including to roughly 140 positions.
Mayor John Laesch has been putting a particular focus on the city’s budget since the first moments he took office. During his inauguration speech in May, he said the city was left in “serious debt” because of past mayors’ investment in revitalizing Aurora’s downtown, and that his administration’s number one priority would be to get the city’s “financial house in order.”
Then, at a town hall meeting with residents in July, Laesch said the city was facing a “significant hole” between revenue and expenses in 2026 based on early budget analysis. That gap was later said to be nearly $30 million.
City officials have said that expenses have outpaced revenue, but past budgets were balanced by moving money typically set aside for long-term needs like insurance and capital projects into the city’s main operating fund, called the general fund. That means the “fundamental financial structure of the city” doesn’t work, according to Aurora Director of Fiscal Integrity and Operations Management Brian Caputo.
Leaders of Aurora city departments over the past several weeks have presented their budgets for 2026 to a committee of the Aurora City Council — and large parts of those discussions have been about where cuts are being made.
The City Council is set to vote on final approval of the proposed budget on Tuesday.
Public safety departments to have fewer positions
Laesch has said, both to reporters and in public statements, that budget cuts won’t mean a reduction in services for residents. But these cuts, particularly those to public safety departments, have been sparking concern among the public, city staff and elected officials.
“There is no scenario where fewer firefighters, less training support, fewer officers and fewer trucks on the street equates to the same level of safety, readiness or service,” said a recent statement from the International Association of Firefighters Local 99, which represents Aurora firefighters. “To claim otherwise is irresponsible.”
Although the 2026 budget proposed for the fire department is actually higher than this year’s, it saw a roughly $2.8 million reduction during the budgeting process for 2026, according to a presentation given by Aurora Chief Financial Officer Stacey Peterson at a meeting of the Aurora City Council’s Committee of the Whole on Tuesday.
The Mayor’s Office gave the Aurora Fire Department a dollar amount to cut from the budget, and those cuts weren’t possible without personnel since that makes up about 92% of the department’s budget, said Fire Chief David McCabe, who has since retired, at a meeting of the City Council Finance Committee on Nov. 20.
In total, the 2026 proposed budget would reduce the fire department’s staff by 18 firefighters, three battalion chiefs and one training officer. Although those positions are being cut from the budget, the people currently in them won’t be laid off — the positions just won’t be filled when those employees retire or leave.
Just before his retirement, McCabe told The Beacon-News that he didn’t want to lose positions but that he realized the financial constraints the city had put on the department. Plus, he and Deputy Fire Chief Kevin Nickel had multiple meetings with the Mayor’s Office to fight to get some positions back and push back against discussed layoffs of some recruits, he said at the time.
When there are fewer positions, a decision has to be made to either staff vehicles with people working overtime or to not staff some vehicles at all, according to McCabe. Laesch has previously said that two of the department’s four ladder trucks could go unstaffed under the proposed 2026 budget.
The last time the fire department had just two ladder trucks was around 2010, and since then calls have gone up by about 50%, McCabe said at the Nov. 20 Finance Committee meeting.
In a statement opposing the cuts, International Association of Firefighters Local 99 President Rob Deubel said that the proposed budget would mean “an increase in unnecessary risk to every citizen and firefighter.”
“These cuts do not save money; they simply shift costs into overtime, injury leave, workers’ compensation and preventable operational failures,” Deubel said in the statement.
State Rep. Stephanie Kifowit, D-Oswego, whose district includes part of Aurora, recently put out a news release standing with Local 99 on this issue.
“Every firefighter removed from a shift and every truck taken out of service slows response and increases risk. Suggesting otherwise is simply irresponsible,” she said in the release. “When our firefighters tell us these cuts are unsafe, we should listen.”
Laesch, at the Committee of the Whole meeting Tuesday, said this was one of his bigger areas of concern. The city will be staying on top of both overtime and response times, he said.
Protecting core services and public safety was a priority during the 2026 budgeting process, according to a joint statement from Laesch, McCabe and Police Chief Matt Thomas addressing claims that the city was making “significant cuts to public safety.” All departments saw some level of budget cuts, the statement said, but police and fire saw the smallest percentage reductions.
“Our residents will not see a reduction in the services they depend on,” Laesch said in the statement. “Response times, emergency services and fire protection remain fully secured. Correcting our financial course is difficult, but we are doing it in a responsible manner that does not compromise safety.”
Thomas said in the statement directly, “the Aurora Police Department is not being gutted.”
Reductions were made, he said, but those decisions were made to make sure the police department still had the staff and resources needed to keep the community safe.
The Aurora Police Department’s proposed 2026 budget, like the fire department’s proposed budget, is higher than last year’s. Still, it would have 35 less positions, among other cuts.
Of those cut positions, nine are sworn police officers while the rest are non-sworn professional staff, including the department’s 12-person cadet program, according to the police department’s budget presentation to the Finance Committee on Nov. 13.
Also like in the fire department, these staffing reductions won’t mean layoffs for any police officer or for nearly any professional staff member — if employees in those cut positions retire or leave, the city just won’t hire someone new to take their place. Only one professional staff member in the police department would be laid off.
Of the 35 positions proposed to be cut from the police department’s budget, 20 were already vacant, including seven of the nine sworn officer positions being cut. However, those positions are only vacant because the department paused hiring practices in the last six months, Deputy Chief of Police Steven Stemmet said during the presentation on Nov. 13.
Staffing isn’t the only place the Aurora Police Department’s budget is proposed to be cut in 2026. Stemmet’s presentation showed that it would also be getting around $800,000 less for general overtime pay and $400,000 less for training, among other cuts.
At that meeting, Thomas said he hopes all cuts to his department’s budget are temporary. While the department can make the sacrifice for next year, Stemmet said, they aren’t sustainable beyond that.
Before his retirement, McCabe told The Beacon-News something similar about the fire department: he is hoping that, in the new year, the city’s “financial picture” changes and any cut positions are able to be restored as soon as possible.
Although some may think the fire department grew too much, he said at the time, fire staff has grown only 20% over the last eight years as compared to a 31% increase in calls over that same period.
Aurora’s budget situation
The joint statement from McCabe, Thomas and Laesch said the reductions in funding to city departments were made to “correct a longstanding structural deficit.” But Richard Irvin, who was mayor for eight years before Laesch, told The Beacon-News that is “absolutely incorrect.”
As evidence, Irvin pointed to the fact that Laesch appointed Stacey Peterson, who under Irvin served as director of Financial Operations, to the top finance spot in the city. Laesch wouldn’t have done that if he thought something was going on with the budget, Irvin said.
Laesch’s philosophy, Irvin said, is to manufacture a crisis and fall back on that “as an excuse to not do anything.”
“If he just stood back and just let the Irvin administration’s successes take place instead of fighting against them, the city would continue to grow,” Irvin said. “But he’s working very hard fighting against all the growth and prosperity and the pride that we built over the last eight years.”
When asked about Irvin saying that the budget crisis was manufactured, Laesch told The Beacon-News that “numbers don’t lie.” The city under Irvin moved funds around to support operations, Laesch said, and “on his way out the door negotiated lucrative contracts with many of the unions that only compounded the problem.”
This 100% is a budget crisis, he said, and the city’s taken as balanced of an approach as possible to address it.
Laesch said that, although he wanted to fix the whole budget this year and be “more aggressive with right-sizing the ship,” he didn’t think aldermen were prepared to do that. The proposed budget won’t take the city “out of this mess,” he said.
The reason for trying to fix it as soon as possible is because the problem compounds and gets more complicated as the city continues paying yearly salary increases, Laesch said.
David Merriman, a professor of public administration at the University of Illinois Chicago, said that while he has no specific knowledge of Aurora’s budget, it is very possible to cover up holes in operating expenses by moving money from funds used for long-term activities into short-term uses.
“I’ve seen it happen in other budgets,” he said.
But also, there is some difference of opinion around the level at which certain long-term funds should be supported, Merriman said, especially around post-employment benefits. And change in leadership’s funding philosophy can put pressure on a budget, he said.
In cases where operational deficits were covered up by moving money around, that typically isn’t something that would need to be addressed immediately, according to Merriman. In general, he said, it’s the kind of thing that someone would develop a plan to fix over a number of years, maybe five years or longer.
That is, unless there is some kind of emergency to point to, he said.
On Tuesday, Chief Financial Officer Peterson outlined some of the funds officials have said haven’t been getting enough support.
One such fund, the Property and Casualty Fund, was budgeted to receive around $5.2 million this year, her presentation showed. However, nearly $9.7 million has been spent from the fund this year, wiping out its starting balance of $3.4 million and putting it over $1 million in the hole.
Another fund she showed, Employee Compensated Benefits, was budgeted to receive $1.1 million in 2025 but has seen $4.3 million in expenses this year, which has taken the balance of that fund into the negative, too.
However, the Employee Health Insurance Fund was actually budgeted for more support than it needed, and is set to end the year with a $3.6 million balance, according to Peterson’s presentation.
Director of Fiscal Integrity and Operations Management Caputo said that these funds are different from a pension fund, where it can be supported at a lower level over 20 or 30 years. There needs to be money to cover the liabilities, since they aren’t so long-term, he said at Tuesday’s meeting.
Further changes in the proposed budget
The 2026 budget for the city’s general fund, which is where its main operating expenses are paid from, is proposed at around $253 million — which is roughly $2 million less than this year’s, Peterson’s presentation showed. Still, that fund is looking at a deficit of around $3.3 million.
The development services, law and public facilities departments are proposed for the largest percentage cuts over this year’s budget, with reductions of around 20% to 30% to the portion of their budgets coming from the general fund, Peterson’s presentation showed.
The fire department and police department saw increases to their budgets year-over-year — as did the Mayor’s Office, community services department and communications department, but those increases may be misleading.
That’s because the proposed budget totally eliminates the community affairs department, splitting its functions between the community services and communications departments, plus moves economic development and the clerk’s office under the Mayor’s Office.
Public facilities would also move to be under the public works department.
The figures presented by Peterson included carryovers from this year’s budget, which are expenses that were budgeted for but weren’t paid during this year for various reasons. Without including those carryovers, the proposed 2026 general fund budget is almost $5.7 million less than this year’s and does not have a deficit.
The numbers shown on Tuesday also include late changes made to the proposed budget. That includes $2 million that Aurora is hoping to get back from the Aurora Regional Economic Alliance, an organization the city last year helped set up with a $3 million payment.
Half of the funds Aurora wants to get back from the Alliance is set to help pay for $2 million the city has promised to the Aurora Civic Center Authority, which operates the Paramount Theatre and other local venues, to plug a hole in that organization’s 2026 budget, Caputo said at a Nov. 18 meeting of the Finance Committee.
The rest of the funds are set to come from the city’s tax on gaming. Revenue projections for that tax were updated during the late changes to consider the expected opening of the new Hollywood Casino location in the city.
The Aurora City Council this year has taken a number of steps to increase or stabilize revenue across its various funds, including an increase to the city’s hotel tax, an increase to parking fees at the city’s two Metra stops, an increase in the number of gambling machines businesses are allowed to operate and the local continuation of a grocery tax set to otherwise expire statewide at the end of the year.
A major source of revenue for the city is property taxes. The levy this year is proposed for $103.7 million, an increase of $11.1 million over the previous year’s.
However, the part of that levy going towards city operations isn’t seeing an increase. Instead, the rising property taxes were attributed to required funding levels for police and firefighter pensions plus to higher debt payments.
The levy was raised in years past, but the currently-proposed increase would also raise the tax rate for the first time in years. The tax levy is the total amount the city of Aurora would be looking to get in property tax revenue next year, but the rate is the percentage of a property’s assessed value that the owner has to actually pay in taxes.
While the budget is up for final approval on Tuesday, the tax levy won’t be considered for final approval by the City Council until Dec. 16.
rsmith@chicagotribune.com