Budget talks already were off to a late start this year on Mayor Brandon $17.3 billion spending plan when City Council voted last month — in a stunning 50-0 tally — to reject Johnson’s proposal for a $300 million property tax hike.
What has happened since is, in a way, similarly unprecedented: Reversing its rubber-stamp legacy, City Council is acting like a true legislative body and engaging in a spirited examination of the mayor’s budget. The mayor and the council must close a $1 billion budget gap in time to meet a legally mandated Dec. 31 deadline, or face a first-ever shutdown of city government.
The most singular sign of the council’s new legislative posture is a move by 15 aldermen to demand detailed budget information from the Johnson administration. And, bucking a mayor who largely has refused to reduce staffing or programs, they’re zeroing in on programs where cuts might be made.
What they’re after is what any city resident might want. They’re demanding a better understanding of why Johnson’s budget proposal would have city spending up nearly 50% since 2020. After all, it’s not as if city services have gotten 50% better in that time.
The aldermen are searching for savings fully aware that most of those increased costs are fixed: Pensions and interest payments, and contractual pay increases, account for a significant portion, for example. And there’s broad agreement that cuts to spending on public safety are off the table.
But Johnson is opposing most other staff cuts and would rely instead on eliminating vacant positions — which helps cut costs, true, but not nearly enough. The mayor also reflexively is looking for new taxing options, some of which may be needed, but the City Council members are insisting on a close look at the spending side of the budget, too.
Ald. Brendan Reilly, 42nd, Ald. Anthony Beale, 9th, and 13 other aldermen are seeking precise details. In a letter to Johnson’s budget team, they requested headcount per department; salaries; and funding sources, from 2020 to 2025 — an effort to track the growth in spending with data that is a matter of public record.
They also, pointedly, asked for total headcount for any new programs created since 2020 — especially department-by-department accounting for new programs funded by the American Rescue Plan Act, the federal pandemic-relief measure passed in 2021.
In the aftermath of the council’s devastating 50-0 vote against his proposed property tax increase, Johnson has both taunted council members — calling the vote a “tantrum,” for example — and also struck a posture of being willing to negotiate. He referred to himself as the “collaborator in chief” in one recent news conference.
If Johnson really were serious about collaborating, he would have provided the aldermen their data by now. But no, he has not. City budget officials have provided far less than was asked for — in response to several carefully delineated questions — and none of it has proved very useful, Beale told me.
Johnson’s delay makes little sense. He has no time to lose. If Dec. 31 comes with no final budget and city government must shut down, it will be Johnson far more than the City Council that the public will hold to account. And an abysmally bad showing at the City Club of Chicago this week — when the entire crowd, except for one table, grimly and silently listened to the mayor claim a list of accomplishments — symbolized how little support he has right now, not just with the general public, but with political insiders, too.
Voters expect the mayor and the City Council to work together. The aldermen, at least, are stepping up. Their letter floats one key proposed solution, alongside the requests for information. Start by setting 2025 departmental spending at pre-pandemic levels, plus inflation, they suggest. The reason? As the pandemic created new demands for government services, spending moved sharply upward, not just in pandemic programs but in other areas, too. That growth now must be curtailed in order to balance the 2025 budget.
Spending from the city’s corporate fund, the heart of the city’s budget, has jumped $1 billion since 2020. More than half of that is in a budget line dominated by payments on pensions and government debt, both of which must be made or the city’s credit rating would take a costly hit.
The remaining amount — somewhere around $500 million, based on my back-of-the-envelope calculation — deserves careful scrutiny.
Some of that $500 million or so in new spending may well prove defensible. Much of it, the city likely can do without. We won’t know until someone looks, and unlike the Lightfoot administration before him — which made systematic searches for inefficiencies and bloat —Johnson has made clear he is reluctant to begin such a search.
As regards the aldermen’s interest in programs created in response to the pandemic, this may seem beside the point. After all, ARPA programs are paid for by federal grants, not the corporate fund. But identifying those programs now — ahead of a Dec. 31 deadline for making new ARPA commitments — can help earmark those programs for shutdown once the last ARPA checks are spent.
The search for cost cuts needs to go well beyond the $500 million or so the 15 aldermen are targeting. And if our “collaborator in chief” wants to make progress toward closing the budget gap, he could stop stalling. Instead, Johnson could reverse field, seize the opening offered by Reilly, Beale and others, and begin working with the legislative body of city government toward a package of tax increases and spending cuts — both of which will be needed to balance this budget.
The clock is ticking, and that Dec. 31 deadline is real.
David Greising is president and CEO of the Better Government Association.
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