A majority of Chicago aldermen are planning to vote to reject the $300 million property tax increase at the heart of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposed 2025 budget.
A group of 29 aldermen banded together Thursday to call a special meeting next Wednesday where the full City Council is set to vote on the property tax hike. The apparent attempt to strike down the mayor’s levy increase comes a week after Johnson introduced his 2025 spending plan — and appears poised to throw the just-starting negotiations over it into disarray.
“It’s time to reject the property tax increase ASAP, so we can negotiate a real budget that actually has a prayer of passing before the end of 2024,” Ald. Brendan Reilly, 42nd, wrote in a post on X announcing the special meeting.
Johnson framed the property tax hike, a reversal of a campaign promise, as a painful but necessary decision to avoid layoffs to the city’s workforce and deep cuts to services. His administration faced a nearly $1 billion shortfall as it crafted its plan to pass a balanced $17.3 billion city budget.
But the mayor’s City Council critics say the administration has not taken seriously their calls for deeper cuts to be made before property taxes are raised.
Although 29 aldermen signed the letter and even more are opposed to the tax hike, it remains to be seen whether the coalition holds and votes to defeat it. Johnson has nearly a week to threaten or cajole a few of the malcontents into backing down, or could also use a procedural maneuver to try to block the vote. And Chicago budget history is full of examples of council members talking about opposing some unpopular mayoral proposal only to have a change of heart when it came time to say aye or nay.
But by scheduling the meeting, aldermen are taking a major first step in trying to force the mayor to find a new path through them to pass a budget.
“This budget is not going to have a $300 million property tax in it,” Ald. Bill Conway, 34th, said. “We need to ensure that we are at least giving the mayor’s office the opportunity to work with us.”
Vice Mayor Ald. Walter Burnett Jr., 27th, shared confidence that Johnson’s administration is pressing everyone from aldermen to city worker unions to liquor companies to come up with ideas to avoid taxes.
“Nobody wants to be taxed,” said Burnett, who did not join the call for the meeting and is Johnson’s Zoning Committee chair. “We are trying to give everybody an opportunity to bring something to the table.”
Some aldermen who did not sign the letter said they are still flatly against the mayor’s proposed tax hike, including several of the council’s most progressive members.
Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez, 25th, quickly came out against the levy just after Johnson finished his budget address last week. But while the Pilsen aldermen, typically a close mayoral ally, plans to vote against the measure, he also believes his colleagues who signed the letter are failing to come up with the alternatives that would be needed in lieu of a property tax hike to balance a budget.
Sigcho-Lopez proposed cutting the $272 million advance pension payment Johnson included in the 2025 budget, a move bond rating agencies have warned against and that Johnson’s finance team said would hurt the city’s long term fiscal health.
“I am not here for the political theater,” Sigcho-Lopez said Thursday. “I am here to provide solutions.”
Ald. Daniel La Spata, who similarly opposes Johnson’s $300 million tax hike, but did not sign on to call for the special meeting, agreed.
“I think the goal is to score political points. I think the goal is to embarrass the mayor,” said La Spata, 1st.
But Ald. Bennett Lawson, 44th, argued there is an alternative that many of the aldermen who scheduled the special meeting have demanded: cuts. The North Side alderman joined the sharp rebuke of Johnson’s plan because there is not enough time to wait on the administration to begin more seriously negotiating with opposed aldermen about the budget, he said.
Chicago could face dire, though unclear consequences if the City Council fails for the first time to pass a balanced budget by the state’s Dec. 31 deadline.
The city’s budget grew steadily for years before ballooning when federal COVID-19 money arrived, Lawson said. Now that the stimulus cash is gone, the bigger budget is no longer sustainable, he added.
“Until we get real about that, we are going to have a $1 billion deficit, or more, for years to come,” he said. “We do not have the sustained revenues to stand up all the programs that the government was throwing money at us for.”
