If he isn’t careful, Mayor Brandon Johnson is going to find himself in another political brawl with the City Council.
The mayor’s team is preparing to plug a $175 million hole blown in their budget for last year caused by the refusal of Chicago’s partially elected school board to cover a $175 million pension contribution that the city has paid already while expecting reimbursement from Chicago Public Schools. A major question is whether the administration will seek approval from aldermen when it settles on where in the $16.6 billion budget for 2024 to find the cash to close the books for a year already past.
In briefings for reporters earlier this week, administration officials were fuzzy on their plans. On the one hand, they intimated there was no legal requirement for a council-approved budget amendment to solve the problem. On the other, they didn’t commit to bypassing the council, either.
Essentially, they said, stay tuned. There still are moving parts to the revenue story for last year, including state funds the city included in its 2024 budget but has yet to receive.
The vagaries of budgeting and accounting can be confusing. Both governments and companies will include monies they expect to receive later in their current statements of financial condition, whether those are earnings reports or government budgets. City officials reassured the public that the $175 million they were counting on from Chicago Public Schools but now won’t receive will not jeopardize their ability to meet their cash obligations.
That’s good.
But here’s the thing for Team Johnson. By now, they should have learned from last year’s nail-biter budget negotiations or from repeated losses in the council on the issue of retaining the ShotSpotter gunshot-detection system or from an array of other fraught dealings with aldermen. Fifth-floor dictates to the council from a mayor as unpopular as Johnson merely poison the well the next time the administration needs council approval. And there’s always a next time.
The city’s budget for 2026 is likely to be every bit as difficult, if not harder, than last year’s. Aldermen put the mayor on notice, with 15 signing a letter warning City Hall to seek council approval for whatever $175 million solution it produces. Even some progressive aldermen who typically have voted with Johnson said that if the administration bypasses the council, it will do so at its political peril.
Consider this as well: The city budget for 2025 also includes an expectation that CPS will contribute $175 million to the Municipal Employees’ Annuity & Benefit Fund, which covers non-teaching CPS employees, as well as city workers. We may well be going through this whole ordeal again in just a few months.
The school system soon will have a new leader. CEO Pedro Martinez, who steadfastly opposed Johnson’s demand that CPS borrow in order to cover the $175 million pension payment, leaves after the current school year. But whoever is running the district after Martinez exits will find CPS in no better condition to pay that large sum than it is now.
Even as the mayor and aldermen face a sizable deficit for 2026 (we don’t yet know how big a hole that will be), they will face the need to find another $175 million for the current year if CPS balks again.
These are the kinds of repeated messes an economically stagnant city faces when its leaders are unwilling even to consider budget cuts in the face of a public that feels tapped out and is prepared to punish politicians who resort to tax increases.
Hard decisions are coming. The mayor would do well to heed the warnings, growing louder by the day, of the aldermen he will be asking to approve those tough calls.
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