A tense budget season for Mayor Brandon Johnson seems to be getting worse, with persistent staffing issues in the office tasked with lobbying the City Council emboldening many aldermen to try to seize control of the process from the self-styled “collaborator-in-chief.”
Johnson’s second spending plan already has faced a series of hurdles that mark this as one of the most contentious fall budget negotiations in recent years. On Thursday, aldermen who have felt ignored throughout the process — among them some close council allies of the mayor — are striking back with an extraordinary special meeting where they aim to vote down his requested $300 million tax increase.
That step comes after a final vote on the budget has already been pushed back twice to mid-December at the earliest, raising the possibility, however remote, that the city might blow past the Dec. 31 deadline to reach a deal for 2025.
Some City Council members who spoke with the Tribune about the budget cycle so far said those issues are in part symptomatic of a troubling vacuum at Johnson’s intergovernmental affairs office, which is tasked with whipping up support in the council. Shepherding the annual budget is usually the IGA’s biggest responsibility, but recent shakeups there have threatened aldermanic relations during a crucial time for Johnson and his progressive agenda.
The IGA office had six vacancies as of the end of October, compared with two in August 2023, requested public records show. There is also no permanent head of the office after Johnson’s last two deputy mayors for intergovernmental affairs quit.
Southwest Side Ald. Matt O’Shea said intergovernmental affairs is now “like a rudderless ship.”
“The whole entire process has been dysfunctional,” he said Wednesday. “I don’t care what neighborhood you’re in or what member of City Council you’re talking to, everybody — I mean, everybody — is angry and frustrated with the situation we’re in. … And to hear yesterday that there’s been great collaboration is insulting.”
O’Shea, 19th, was referring to Johnson’s news conference Tuesday in which the mayor said he wasn’t wedded to the now-imperiled $300 million property tax increase and insisted that reporters refer to him as the “collaborator-in-chief.”
“As a public school teacher, sometimes we do things to get people’s attention. And so now that we have the attention of everyone, I’ve said from the very beginning, this is a proposal,” Johnson said. “I’m a collaborative mayor. For the first time in the history of Chicago you’re actually seeing that type of collaborative approach.”
In a phone interview, top Johnson aide Kennedy Bartley said Emily Melbye is the acting head of intergovernmental affairs, reporting to her. Bartley acknowledged that the lobbying operation has staffing shortages, but she added that its employees also have “tenacity and diligence” that aldermen value.
“They have been deeply appreciative of the productivity and the communication that they’re seeing from IGA and the path forward,” Bartley said of City Council members.
Ald. Samantha Nugent, 39th, said she has noticed “a lot more engagement” from the mayor’s staff in recent days. It is “not a secret” that the mayor’s lobbying team is understaffed, but there seems to be more traction from the Johnson administration in responding to the City Council’s requests, she said.
“I think that’s a welcome thing. I think we have a long way to go, though,” she said.
Ald. Daniel La Spata, 1st, said that while Johnson’s lobbying team is a “very limited resource right now,” the conversations he has had with the shrunken team have been productive, along with recent aldermanic briefings with the mayor’s top budget officials.
“It’s kind of ‘IGA and friends,’” La Spata said. “Everybody’s titles and responsibilities feel like they are in a state of flux.”
Several meetings with the Johnson administration and about two dozen aldermen that took place Saturday were characterized by attendees as a productive step forward, though some lamented that it should have happened earlier. The mayor’s budget team walked through some tax ideas before leaving aldermen to confer with Bartley and Johnson’s senior adviser Jason Lee on how those proposals could whittle down the $300 million hole if aldermen kill the tax hike.
Some aldermen said they wished the mayor’s financial gurus had stayed to work on those possibilities, but Bartley said their attendance at the beginnings of the meetings highlighted Johnson’s efforts to be transparent and collaborative. The mayor’s budget leaders “are incredibly busy people,” she said.
“We were able to have even more productive conversations because our budget and finance teams provided the parameters and details so that we were able to operate from kind of a level field,” she said.
La Spata, present for one meeting, said the presence of budget leaders helped him and other aldermen get a better understanding of how different revenue-raising options could play out.
“That’s the only meeting of that sort I’ve been a part of in the just over six years I’ve been in office,” he said.
But while other aldermen frustrated with the budget process and overall relations with the mayor’s office said they didn’t blame the remaining IGA staffers, they felt the lobbying arm wasn’t empowered to shore up votes. The effectiveness of an IGA arm hinges on building long-term trust between the administration and aldermen, and it’s difficult to manufacture that on a tight schedule.
O’Shea was one of 10 “budgeteers” tapped by the mayor’s IGA team this summer to make suggestions to the administration on priorities for the 2025 budget. The group of aldermen from across the city met four times from July to October with senior Johnson officials, but O’Shea said their discussions didn’t seem to move the needle on the mayor’s ultimate spending plan he presented Oct. 30.
Some of the solutions floated in those Saturday meetings include new revenue such as legalizing video gambling in Chicago, but that requires Springfield approval. And Johnson’s deputy IGA director who handles state government, Mike Ciaccio, is quitting at the end of this month, three sources confirmed to the Tribune, making it even tougher for the mayor to make inroads with the General Assembly.
Before Johnson took office in May 2023, his transition team fired predecessor Lori Lightfoot’s IGA appointee Beth Beatty, only to swiftly rehire her.
Then Sydney Holman was tapped in November, but abruptly resigned this September after hearing about the mayor’s plan to install Bartley in a high-ranking position that would oversee Holman’s role.
Two staffers brought on during Holman’s tenure also left at the same time. A month later, Holman’s interim replacement Erik Martinez quit too.
Holman’s tenure marked the only “non-chaotic” point in the mayor’s lobbying efforts, said Ald. Bill Conway, 34th.
“But since then, the significant amount of turnover in IGA is partially responsible for the chaos of this budget season,” Conway added.
Conway said Johnson’s trouble working with the City Council extends to scheduling, a typically behind-the-scenes process that sparked debate among aldermen Tuesday when they learned that meetings for the rest of the week and even later that same afternoon would be canceled.
Aldermen on Tuesday balked as they learned that the already-behind budget process would face further delays.
Budget Committee Chair Ald. Jason Ervin, 28th, shared a plan to cancel hearings scheduled for Wednesday and next Monday to allow aldermen to attend the funerals of former Ald. Bill Beavers and slain police Officer Enrique Martinez. Ervin also shifted the schedule to allow longer hearings for the city’s most expensive departments, a move he said will allow aldermen to better vet their budgets and make thoughtful cuts.
“We’re talking about the changes we need to make on the tax side, we really have discussions on the expense side,” he told the committee.
The previously scheduled early-December first vote on the budget was already set to be the city’s latest since 2009 after Johnson delayed his budget proposal introduction by two weeks in October.
