Pritzker Says City Leaders Have Not Approached the State About Chicago’s Budget Deficit

Amanda Vinicky | September 10, 2024, 5:52 pm

Gov. J.B. Pritzker is pictured in a July 2023 file photo. (Jerry Nowicki / Capitol News Illinois)

As Chicago grapples with a nearly $1 billion budget gap in the coming year, the city shouldn’t count on the state to help fill it.

So far, the city hasn’t asked for any assistance, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said Tuesday, when asked by reporters following an unrelated event.

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“They have not approached us about any it,” Pritzker said. “We haven’t been asked for anything in particular.”

Pritzker said he’s “read things in the newspaper” about relief Chicago may want from the Illinois government, but at this point that’s not something his budget team is thinking about.

The city and state have different fiscal timelines.

Illinois’ fiscal year begins in July. The governor annually introduces a proposed budget in February, which serves as the takeoff for the legislature’s spending plan, which is typically approved by the General Assembly by the end of May.

“We don’t plan our next budget until I introduce it in February, and I don’t think there’ll be any supplemental that’ll be discussing what the city would want, though we haven’t been asked,” Pritzker said.

Chicago’s fiscal year runs with the calendar. A mayor must submit a proposed budget by mid-October, for the Chicago City Council to approve by year’s end so it can go into effect come January.

Mayor Brandon Johnson released a forecast in late August estimating the city will face a $982 million budget gap in 2025.

That’s on top of a nearly $223 million deficit this year, which the administration announced Monday it will tackle by implementing a hiring freeze and limiting travel and overtime.

Chicago Public Schools — which, like Illinois, has a fiscal year beginning in July — is also projecting deficits for its next fiscal year, and will likely have a shortfall this year as well, given that the teachers’ union contract that’s currently in negotiations is expected to add to the district’s bottom line.

Johnson and the CTU — which used to employ Johnson as an organizer and supported his mayoral campaign — have been publicly calling on the state to send more money to CPS.

They’re basing their call for an extra $1 billion on a 2018 law that uses an “evidence-based funding” formula to determine how much Illinois’ 852 school districts should receive from the state so that when combined with local resources, spending on students in all districts would reach what the state determines would be an “adequate” amount, with a goal of reaching that target within a decade.

According to the latest projections, CPS would need more than $1 billion to reach that target.

Rather than wait, Johnson and the CTU said Illinois should spend $3.6 billion on districts statewide to meet that adequate funding now.

CTU President Stacy Davis Gates has admonished the state to do more, beseeching the CPS board of education at its most recent meeting to ask for more from the state.

“What is your Springfield plan?” Davis Gates said. “Because we’ve offered plenty of strategies that have not been responded to or rejected by CPS. So what is your strategy?”

She told board members on Aug. 29 that “every school district in this state is going to have the same calamity that you’re facing next year, and it’s not going to be enough money” with the end of COVID-19-era Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) grant funding.

Pritzker said “if we had extra money it would go to education” and that Illinois added $350 million to the base of education funding this year.

The governor diminished the notion that Johnson’s continued calls for the state to spend more on education is causing any rift between the two Democrats.

“There are challenges that we both have,” Pritzker said. “The state of Illinois provides billions of dollars to the city of Chicago every single year, and we’re going to continue to do that. But we can’t just, you know, snap our fingers…. We don’t print money at the state level.”

Pritzker said he sympathized with Chicago’s budget situation, noting that when he became governor in 2019 it was on the heels of a historic partisan impasse that left Illinois with a backlog of unpaid bills and knocks to the state’s already low credit rating, and then came revenue hits early during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’ve been in situations like this,” Pritzker said. “It’s very, very difficult and challenging, but it’s something you can tough your way through. And then you’ve got to plan for years to come, how you’re going to manage balanced budget going forward without raising broadly taxes on the people of Illinois.”

Johnson’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.

The mayor during his campaign said he would not raise property taxes, but in announcing the shortfalls his budget team did not close off that possibility.