Hold on for Those Reinforcements

Not even 24 hours after promising Chicago he'd hire 100 more officers to stem the shortage of 2,230 officers and the 100-plus retiring every month, Shortshanks is admitting he doesn't have the money:

• The city needs to hire 100 more police officers, Mayor Richard Daley said today, but should not fund their salaries from a tax program reserved for promoting economic development.

  "You have to hire a hundred new police officers," Daley said at a news conference to open a new Target store in the Uptown neighborhood.
  
  But hiring more officers will only partially address the problem of crime in Chicago, Daley said.

We guess it will be a little while longer until we can bid for that 13B furlough if there's no one coming up behind us.

And this quote is just freaking priceless:

• If the officers were hired as some aldermen have suggested by tapping money from the city's tax increment financing program, it would throw the budget out of whack because those funds run out after a fixed number of years, the mayor said.
  
  "To balance your budget, if you start taking TIF money only once, then what do you do?" Daley said.

Hmmm. We don't know Dick. What happens if you take all the money from a 99-year-lease on parking meters and blow through the entire amount in less than three years in some bizarre attempt to win a global sporting event that hasn't made a profit (and won't be making a profit) in 32 years?

Oh wait. That did happen. And we're seeing the results each and every day here in Chi-troit II.