After weeks of acrimony, the City Council approved Mayor Brandon Johnson’s revised $17.3 billion budget — minus a $68.5 million property tax increase — averting what would have been the first budget shutdown in its history.
The 27-23 vote on the 2025 spending plan and $165.5 million tax package did not come easy.
Johnson managed to secure a victory on the most important Council vote of the year — but only after making several rounds of changes and calling off a vote last Friday last Friday that he was destined to lose.
Monday’s meeting got off to a rocky start after raucous protests — described by Ald. Ray Lopez (15th) as “anti-Trump and anti-facist” — continued in the public gallery — even after Johnson pleaded for calm. The mayor then asked the sergeant-at-arms to clear the chamber, prompting a recess.
Clearing the chamber took a few minutes. The meeting reconvened at 2:25 p.m. with some members of the public allowed to return.
Southwest Side Ald. Marty Quinn (13th) opened the debate by declaring two reasons he planned to vote ‘no.’ First, Quinn said, “We haven’t made enough cuts. We haven’t cut positions that are redundant. We keep spending. … As a result, we’ll be faced with the same challengers next year.”
The second reason: Johnson’s decision to ignore the longstanding demand to divide the Chicago Lawn police district to create a new Southwest Side police district. That would, supporters argue, speed response time. The Chicago Lawn district now serves the second-largest geographic area in the city, but has the fewest officer per capita.
“Residents of the 13th Ward feel you are working against them, Mr. Mayor. They need a new police district and they’ve been vocal about it,” Quinn said, citing the 88% support in a recent referendum.
“They can’t keep giving more when they have real asks that are being ignore.”
‘Show some courage’
Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd), Public Safety Committee chair, said his goal was to defeat a property tax increase, but “we did not defeat it. We simply delayed it. We kicked the can down the road. … We will be right back here next year … and it will be worse.”
Ald. Anthony Beale (9th) ridiculed his colleagues for flexing their newfound political muscle, only to cave before reaching the goal line. Beleaguered Chicago taxpayers are crying out for deep spending cuts. Johnson’s final budget, Beale said, doesn’t even scratch the surface.
“To ignore the will of the people, you all, is something everybody in this room is gonna have to reckon with in a couple of years,” Beale said, referring to the 2027 aldermanic election.
“When you’re staring down an opponent, you can say, ‘I sold my vote for a little bit of this and a little bit of that with a letter committing extra resources we know we don’t have.’ … We have to stop this train wreck. We have to stop this spending. … Stand up and do what your people are asking you to do. Don’t take the easy route. Show some courage. Don’t go along just to get along.”
But Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th), the mayor’s hand-picked Housing Committee chair, praised the Johnson for delivering what Chicago taxpayers and their elected representatives demanded: a budget that freezes property taxes.
That “was not done in previous administrations,” Sigcho-Lopez said — so where, he wondered, were all the calls for Council courage then?
“I wish some of my colleagues” had the courage “to tell Mayor Rahm Emanuel, in 2016, `no’ to a $600 million property tax increase. We needed that courage then,” Sigcho-Lopez said.
“I wish some of my colleagues could go back in time and stop themselves from privatizing the parking meters for 75 years — that has been costly to the taxpayers.”
Ald. Anthony Beale (9th) ridiculed his Chicago City Council colleagues for flexing their newfound political muscle but then caving in. Chicago taxpayers want deep spending cuts, he argued, and he believes Mayor Brandon Johnson’s final budget doesn’t even scratch the surface.
Even Progressive Caucus unhappy
But not all the Council’s progressive colleagues were as happy with the outcome.
Alderpersons Andre Vasquez (40th) and Maria Hadden (49th) may co-chair a Progressive Caucus that forms the core of Johnson’s support, but they admonished the mayor for a series of budget missteps that created a deep distrust between Johnson and an emboldened City Council.
“Mr. Mayor, we have heard a lot about your progressive values throughout this process and I don’t doubt them. But how we do things is just as important as what we do. And how you’ve led this process has left the City Council fractured, Chicagoans less trusting in government and it’s left our city in an extremely vulnerable position … with the promise of attacks from a new presidential administration,” Hadden said.
“We are not prepared and the fault lies squarely with you and your administration. … This budget may have some progressive outcomes. But the process to get here was anything but progressive.”
Vasquez agreed a “lack of leadership and collaboration” from the Johnson administration “made a difficult budget even harder.”
”This budget process has left many Chicagoans, including many members of this Council, feeling a lack of confidence and a lack of trust in the city’s government,” Vasquez said.
“Chicago has a history of making financial decisions in the interest of short-term political expediency that lead to disastrous long-term consequences and this budget represents more of the same,” he added, referring to a plan to restructure the debt the city still owes on the site of the now-demolished Michael Reese Hospital.
“By choosing to skip a payment to retire a $40 million debt for a … short-term fix, this administration is saddling the city with even more debt that will make future budgets worse. Chicago’s structural revenue percentage will go down from 78% to 69%, which will likely lead to a credit downgrade that will cost future taxpayers billions of dollars,” Vasquez said.
“We cannot continue down this path that undermines the progressive movement, that undermines the ability to govern responsibly, and that further erodes the public’s confidence in government. Chicagoans don’t have any more patience for excuses, for hollow, evasive answers, and for obliviousness from their mayor. Chicagoans deserve serious, responsible, and focused leadership to address the challenges ahead.”
Backing off a property tax hike
The mayor originally proposed a $300 million property tax increase that broke his campaign promise to hold the line on property taxes, then he agreed to cut the increase in half after the Council took the extraordinary step of rejecting it by a unanimous vote. He then tried for a $68.5 million property tax hike, to no avail.
Johnson also proposed a 34% increase in the liquor tax, then agreed to scrap it altogether after an outcry from the hospitality industry and alderpersons whose bars, restaurants and liquor stores could lose business to surrounding suburbs.
The mayor agreed to restore 162 Chicago police jobs tied to implementing a consent decree outlining the terms of federal court oversight of the Chicago Police Department after Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul threatened to ask a judge to hold the city in contempt.
And he cut $90 million worth of spending from federal pandemic relief funds, in part, by scrapping a second round of guaranteed basic income and a small-business assistance program.
With all of those changes, he was still seven votes short of the 26 needed for passage. Friday’s delay forced the mayor back to the drawing board to hunt for more votes over the weekend.
To get those votes, he scrapped the $68.5 million property tax increase. So although Chicago property owners bracing for reassessments have been spared a double-whammy, the Chicago Board of Education will once again hit them with a property tax increase that amounts to the maximum allowed by state law.
The mayor’s revised budget also would hit Chicagoans in the wallet in a host of other ways, such as adding an amusement tax on streaming services; higher taxes on cloud computing, business software and equipment leases; and higher taxes on parking and downtown congestion.
In the case of the loan used to buy the Michael Reese Hospital site, Johnson’s administration argues that restructuring that debt is estimated to save $40 million on next year’s budget. And it’s not the first time that the city has refinanced the Reese debt.
When he was mayor, Rahm Emanuel lightened the load of the financial albatross — twice.
The city saved $14.5 million with a refinancing that reduced a fixed interest rate of 7.5% to 5.95%.
Then, six years later, Emanuel reduced the burden again by paying off the outstanding promissory note with MRL Financing and refinancing the debt with PNC Bank at a fixed interest rate of 3.55%.
That saved taxpayers $4.25 million, reducing the principal and interest still owed from $120.7 million to $116.5 million. The city bought that site to turn it into an Olympic Village for the 2016 Games that eventually went to Rio de Janeiro.
Still not good enough, says Council’s ‘Common Sense Caucus’
For 15 members of the so-called “Common Sense Caucus,” the mayor’s final offer barely scratched the surface.
They demanded $823.7 million in cuts that include eliminating the $61.3 million-a-year Office of Public Safety Administration and scrapping Johnson’s $50 million plan to create 2,000 more summers jobs and increase spending to combat homelessness. They also wanted to cut the $435,000-a-year budget for the office of the vice mayor, a post held by 27th Ward Ald. Walter Burnett.
For all the concessions Johnson was forced to make, Civic Federation President Joe Ferguson was not impressed.
The budget version up for a vote on Monday reflected an effort to “avoid actually doing anything other than get to 26 votes,” he said.
“We are at the end of the runway, and the city has to get busy about its structural problems,” Ferguson added.
“The measures taken here … do not put us in any better situation for 2026, where the challenge will be even greater. That is what the rating agencies want to see. They’re not looking at whether or not we have a budget by Dec. 31,” Feguson said of the all-important bond rating that determines city borrowing costs.
“They’re looking at whether or not that budget goes in reverse with regard to bad practices … and manifests an intention through substantive measures to begin to address the true structural challenges the city has. This doesn’t do it. … This is largely a revenue and one-time solutions budget. There is no leaning into the expenditure side. No leaning into the revenue side.”
Jason Lee, senior advisor to Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, attends a news conference Friday where Johnson addressed the media after the City Council meeting adjourned. Alderpersons return Monday to again consider passing a 2025 budget.
Some ‘mistakes,’ aide says, but a ‘good process’ in the end
Senior mayoral adviser Jason Lee said “there are always mistakes,” and the Johnson administration made a few that may have contributed to contentious negotiations and distrust with a Council emboldened by the mayor’s anemic public approval ratings.
But the sometimes messy process was no different than what goes on all of the time in “every other body of government,” Lee said.
And he denied Johnson will pay a political price for his stumbles.
“We’re paid to do a job. It can be difficult. It can be easy. Whatever. If I’m the public, the only thing I want to know is … what was the outcome? What did we achieve? What does that mean for me as a resident of the city of Chicago,” Lee said.
“This was a negotiation. And the outcome is not bad at all given the realities that we face. There are major efficiencies in this budget. There’s investments in this budget. There’s some new revenue in this budget. Fiscal obligations are met in this budget. What is the outcome that people should be upset with?” he asked.
Lee denied it was a mistake for the mayor to introduce a budget that included a $300 million property tax increase at a time when property owners have or will be hit by reassessment increases.
Property taxes are “the most widely known predictable revenue currently available to municipal governments in the state of Illinois,” and therefore, it made sense to propose it to chip away at the city’s structural deficit, Lee said.
“What we said from day 1 is, we can work with the Council on finding other forms of revenue to help us meet our obligations, fund our government, make some investments and not have to cut services. … That was achieved in this budget,” he said. “By having a structural placeholder like property taxes, that created the space for a conversation on revenue that was available to us. Ultimately, that was a good process.”