The interim head of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s team that works to get the City Council and other elected officials to support the mayor’s agenda is stepping down. The resignation follows a City Hall shakeup just a month ago that left aldermen concerned about upcoming deliberations on the 2025 city budget.
Erik Martinez departed City Hall on Friday, the mayor’s office announced, after a brief stint in which he took over for Sydney Holman — the deputy mayor of intergovernmental affairs since last November — on a temporary basis in September. Martinez’s exit follows a major reorganization in which Holman and two staffers brought in during her tenure all left in the wake of an administrative reshuffling.
Martinez had been with the administration for more than a year and in a statement Friday said he was proud of the city phasing out the subminimum wage and Chicago’s efforts in dealing with the migrant crisis.
“I am proud of the work Mayor Johnson and this administration has accomplished during my tenure,” Martinez said in the statement.
Previously an IGA liaison with Gov. JB Pritzker’s office, Holman resigned after an internal announcement that the mayor would install a community organizer who joined the mayor’s office in May to a high-ranking position that would oversee Holman’s office. That organizer, Kennedy Bartley, is the former executive director of United Working Families, a political organization closely aligned with the Chicago Teachers Union.
Bartley’s rise up the Johnson administration was viewed as a sign of progressive influence growing within Johnson’s inner circle. Bartley later found herself apologizing to aldermen for past anti-police remarks that were revealed after she was assuming her new role.
Aldermen at the time expressed concern about Holman’s exit, noting the timing was just ahead of a budget season that is sure to require tough decisions over how to close a nearly $1 billion deficit. Holman’s job of wrangling 26 out of 50 aldermen to support Johnson’s agenda saw an unusual number of close votes and defeats, though she was a respected presence among many City Council members who said those setbacks were outside her control.
Progressive Caucus co-chair Ald. Maria Hadden, 49th, at the time called the September reshuffling “very disturbing” in a newsletter to constituents and added that she was disappointed Johnson had the two IGA staffers, who she said are both Black women, walked out of City Hall by police.
The IGA office’s first sign of turbulence took place before Johnson took office, when his transition team fired predecessor Lori Lightfoot’s appointee Beth Beatty only to swiftly rehire her. Since then, Johnson has cast two tie-breaker votes on heated subjects — the censure attempt of one of his top allies and a Gaza cease-fire resolution — and lost a vote on taking control of the ShotSpotter gunshot detection system from his hands.
Johnson’s monthslong attempt to install another ally, Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez, 25th, as chair of the powerful Zoning Committee also faltered after Johnson failed to shore up support among aldermen. And his Springfield agenda is facing similar headwinds as Pritzker and state lawmakers remain hesitant to bite on a new taxpayer-financed Chicago Bears stadium or on $1.1 billion in additional state funding for Chicago Public Schools.
But if the mayor was nervous about the state of relations with aldermen or state lawmakers, he has not shown it. Asked by reporters Monday about the latter group, he mused, “The power doesn’t have to be flexed. The power just is.”
And after another rambunctious City Council meeting Wednesday, the mayor brushed off the notion he could have behaved differently to avoid an outcome of aldermen upset with the turmoil within the CPS board openly rebelling against him: “If I were to do anything differently, I would not be a man of my word.”
