As turmoil continues to swirl around the Chicago Public Schools, a push by the Chicago City Council to put CEO Pedro Martinez and board members on the hot seat fizzled Wednesday.

No current or former members of the Chicago Board of Education attended the marathon session of the City Council’s Education Committee, even after some City Council members threatened to hit them with subpoenas to require them to appear.

Ald. Jeanette Taylor, the chair of the committee, said the new board members were “not prepared” to attend Wednesday’s hearing. Taylor, a member of the City Council’s Democratic Socialist Caucus, participated in a 2015 hunger strike to prevent CPS from closing Dyett High School while former Mayor Rahm Emanuel was in office.

Taylor urged her colleagues to focus on solutions to the structural problems facing CPS, which started decades ago.

“We've been doing the same crap for 50 years,” Taylor said. “Who suffers? Our young people.”

But much of the more than five-hour hearing focused on the current controversy, which burst into public view nearly a month ago when Martinez said he refused Mayor Brandon Johnson’s request to resign. But other alderpeople peppered Martinez with questions about issues specific to their ward, diluting the session’s focus.

“I don’t even know what we were supposed to accomplish today,” said Ald. Jason Ervin (28th Ward), a close ally of the mayor.

The district has been engulfed in turmoil since the CPS board approved a budget for 2025 that did not make a required $175 million payment to one of its employee pension funds or set aside money to pay for a new CTU contract that includes pay raises for teachers, more art teachers and services for children experiencing homelessness.

CPS needs an additional $300 million to pay those bills, Martinez said.

Johnson has proposed borrowing money to cover those costs, but Martinez has called the proposal backed by the mayor “exorbitant” and fiscally irresponsible.

“We need to have a come to Jesus moment,” Ald. Pat Dowell (3rd Ward) said. “We are in the intensive care unit. We are on life support.”

Instead, the City Council should fill that gap with property tax revenue now set aside in special funds designed to fight blight across the city, Martinez said. He first made those pleas last week during a series of media appearances after Johnson replaced all of the members of the CPS board.

Despite facing pointed questions from alderpeople across the political spectrum, Martinez broke no new ground about a potential solution to the financial crisis confronting the nation’s fourth largest school district.

It is unlikely the city can dip into those funds, generated by tax-increment financing districts, known as TIFs, deep enough to solve the school district’s financial woes without forcing long-planned redevelopment projects to grind to a halt.

No alderperson said they were willing to cancel projects planned for TIF districts in their ward to help fill CPS’s budget deficit, although a majority of alderpeople have said they oppose Johnson’s plan to borrow.

Since their creation in the mid-1980s, TIFs have been beloved by Chicago City Council members for providing a dedicated fund for a host of programs, ranging from road improvements to school additions and expanded park facilities. Those projects are not OK’d without the approval of local alderpeople, giving them a large amount of power at City Hall.

For many years, TIF districts have claimed a growing share of city property tax revenues, fueling the debate over whether the districts, which work by capturing all growth in the property tax base in a designated area for 23 years, exacerbate growing inequality in Chicago.

Critics of TIFs have long believed they are inherently inequitable by generating the fewest resources in areas where the need is the greatest. Leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union have long decried TIFs for redirecting property taxes from the school district to private developments, an argument Martinez embraced on Wednesday.

In 2023, Johnson declared $433.8 million in TIF funds to be in surplus — returning $100 million to the city and sending $226 million back to CPS. 

The city has already promised to provide $160 million in surplus TIF funds to CPS, but has yet to announce how big this year’s TIF surplus will be, records show.

The school district’s longstanding financial woes worsened significantly this year, as the district exhausted its share of the federal COVID-19 relief funds that kept the district afloat during the pandemic.

Ald. Angela Clay (46th Ward) pressed Martinez, who has led the district since 2021, on why he used those grant funds to cover the district’s ongoing operations while knowing that they would run out by 2025, leaving programs in jeopardy of being cut and employees at risk of layoffs.

“We all knew this day would come,” Clay said. “What’s the plan?"

Martinez did not directly answer Clay’s question, but spoke at length on the need for additional aid from the state and his commitment to investing in Chicago schools and students.

Alderpeople also pressed Martinez about his decision to compile a list of schools with extremely low enrollments that could be closed or combined with other schools.

Johnson was infuriated to learn Martinez had crafted a list of schools that could be closed without informing him first, a senior aide to Johnson told WTTW News.

A former middle school social studies teacher, Johnson helped lead CTU’s 2012 strike and campaigned against Emanuel’s decision to close 50 schools in 2013, the largest school closure in the nation.

More than a decade later, the closures did nothing to steady the district’s financial position and left deep wounds in communities where schools were closed.

Although Martinez initially said that list was crafted as part of an effort to compile a five-year strategic plan for the district. But on Wednesday, Martinez said the list was crafted to anticipate he would be asked to consider closing schools amid a budget deficit.

“The financial savings were just not sufficient enough to break the trust with communities, not worth it for us,” Martinez said.

Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone | (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]