The city has hired or promoted 490 employees in the six weeks since Mayor Brandon Johnson announced the hiring freeze, with the Chicago Police Department seeing the most new hires.

The employment data, obtained by WBEZ through an open records request, includes 268 new hires through Oct. 21. In total, the hires and promotions total about $31.4 million in annual salaries – a fraction of the year-end deficit of $223 million and Budget gap of $982.4 million for 2025.

The mayor’s administration announced the hiring freeze on September 9 in an effort to close the immediate 2024 deficit, caused by underperforming revenues and a disputed CPS pension payment. Budget officials later clarified that public safety-related positions would be exempt from the hiring freeze on a case-by-case basis.

But the city still made hires and promotions in all departments, including within the mayor’s office and the city council. The Chicago Police Department had the most new hires and promotions with 83, of which 61 were police officers. The Chicago Fire Department recorded 14 new hires, including 12 new paramedics.

Budget officials previously said 3,500 positions, including open ones, would be affected by the hiring freeze and that they expected to save $100 million from the move. But Ald. Scott Waguespack, 32nd Ward, questions those calculations.

“I think the whole thing was a failure. It just shows there is no fiscal responsibility,” said Waguespack, a former Finance Committee chairman and frequent Johnson critic. “When I see him ignoring his own orders, and other elected officials ignoring those orders, it just shows that to me, this is just a charade that they put on in the first place.”

Justin Marlowe, director of the Center for Municipal Finance at the University of Chicago, said it’s possible a hiring freeze could result in hundreds of millions in savings for the city. But as the end of the fiscal year approaches, she will take “drastic measures” like a stricter hiring freeze and more transparency to understand how the city met its estimates.

“The real question is whether these staff additions and salary increases will diminish the expected savings from the freeze,” said Ralph Martire, executive director of the bipartisan Center for Tax and Budget Accountability. “Only the city can tell us.”

Spokespeople for City Hall and the budget office did not respond to requests for comment.

The chairman of the city council’s budget committee, Ald. Jason Ervin, 28th Ward, did not respond to a request for comment.

The city faced a swift backlash from aldermen over concerns that police and firefighters could be impacted by the citywide freeze. The budget office clarified two days later that public safety personnel required by the consent decree were exempt, but faced further criticism when recruit courses were delayed by two months.

Tax experts said it was not surprising to see new hires despite the freeze. Some offers may have been made before the policy was announced. Spokespeople for the City Hall and budget offices did not provide details on the timing of the bids. Lori Lightfoot, former mayor similarly, 230 employees hired or promoted on the city’s payroll in the eight weeks following the announcement of a hiring freeze in 2019.

Joe Ferguson, president of the Civic Federation, said that “a hiring freeze rarely means a 100 percent hiring freeze.”

“But the communications around this particular public announcement were too broad,” Ferguson said, noting that the administration did not initially clarify that all public safety-related positions could be exempt. “Almost immediately, they had to do some sort of reset to say, ‘No, we weren’t talking about public safety (which would face a hiring freeze).’ ” Well, they probably didn’t mean anything else either.

Personnel – from salaries to pensions and overtime – makes up the majority of the city’s expenses and “is one of the main drivers of spending growth.” according to the 2025 budget forecast. That makes personnel an area ripe for scrutiny, but tax experts said a hiring freeze should be paired with a more comprehensive audit of vacancies, staffing and the unique needs of different departments in order to be effective .

“Instead, what we get is what we have now, which is very reactionary, move quickly, try to avoid exceptions but some exceptions are inevitable, kind of scenario,” said Marlowe. “And when you do that, you take a solution, like a hiring freeze – which is pretty undesirable in the first place – and you just make things worse by not implementing it as effectively as possible.”

Other departments that saw the most new hires and promotions included: the Department of Streets and Sanitation (57), the Board of Election Commissioners (43), the Chicago Department of Aviation (37), and the Department of Water Management (32).

But the promotions and new hires affected all city departments, with 10 at City Hall and 15 on the City Council, mostly made up of alderman and legislative assistants.

The highest-paid promotion was Kennedy Bartley, the mayor’s external affairs chief, with a salary of $192,000. The highest-paid new employee was Nathaniel Hernandez, chief deputy counsel for the legal department, with a salary of $162,816, according to employment data obtained by WBEZ.

“The mayor should stay the course on the salaries of his staff and his administrators as a member of the team to kind of lead by example,” Martire said.

Ferguson argued that a lack of transparency about the motivations for promotions or high-level hires could lead to unwarranted criticism.

“If a salary increase results from a promotion, and a promotion is an essential position, I think people would say, ‘Okay, I understand that,’” Ferguson said. “But you have to be transparent about it, because in the absence of explanations, there are all kinds of narratives that are not so good that people will fill in the blank.”

Johnson is expected to unveil his proposed 2025 budget on Wednesday, which he delayed two weeks as his administration worked to “evaluate all options” to fill the massive budget hole.

But ten progressive aldermen had pushed for the administration to give the City Council more time, not less, to evaluate the proposed budget. In an Oct. 3 letter obtained by WBEZ, aldermen shared “serious concerns that the revised schedule risks hindering the deliberations and collaboration that this moment requires.” Guzman dismissed those concerns in an Oct. 9 letter in response, writing that the budget would not be ready until Wednesday.

With a budget deficit of nearly $1 billion expected next year, crafting a budget that closes it and sticks to it will require “really serious, proactive, hard work said Marlowe.

“When you see the hiring freeze that hasn’t been executed as some might like thus far… it begs the question: They can make a plan, but can they stick to that plan? said Marlowe.

Tessa Weinberg and Mariah Woelfel cover Chicago government and politics for WBEZ. Amy Qin is a data reporter for WBEZ.