Politics
Lacking Needed Support, Mayor Brandon Johnson Calls Off Budget Vote as Deadline Looms
Mayor Brandon Johnson delivers his budget address on Oct. 30, 2024. (WTTW News)
Mayor Brandon Johnson called off the vote planned for Friday on his $17.3 billion 2025 spending plan, raising the odds of an unprecedented shutdown of city government in just 18 days.
Johnson’s decision to delay the budget vote is an acknowledgment that the spending plan that would hike property taxes by $68.5 million and increase a host of other taxes and fees by an additional $165.5 million does not have enough votes to pass the Chicago City Council, even if Johnson cast a tie-breaking vote.
The City Council voted 32-17 to recess the meeting, causing members of the public who had planned to speak during the public comment portion of the meeting to erupt in anger.
The City Council also failed to honor the Ogden Park Vikings football team as planned, forcing team members and coaches who traveled to City Hall from Englewood on a bitterly cold day to head home without their moment in the spotlight. The City Council was also supposed to recognize members of the transgender community who have died or been killed as a result of bias or discrimination.
The City Council is scheduled to meet again at 1 p.m. Monday, ensuring officials will spend another weekend frantically trying to figure out how to balance the budget without hiking property taxes.
Pledging to work through the weekend to craft a deal that can win at least 25 City Council votes, Johnson said he was “optimistic” an agreement will be reached that “invests in people” and starts to repair the damage caused to the city’s finances by his predecessors.
“If you’re asking me if [the vote is] going to be close, yes, it’s going to be close,” Johnson said.
Johnson and the City Council now have two and a half weeks to come up with a new spending plan for 2025. Chicago officials have known since the end of August that the city’s 2025 budget would have to bridge a $982.4 million shortfall. Officials have yet to figure out how to fill the remaining $337.4 million budget gap.
The mayor’s third budget proposal, which was narrowly endorsed by the City Council’s Budget and Finance committees on Tuesday, would have hiked property taxes by $68.5 million and increased a host of other taxes and fees by an additional $165.5 million.
To this point, Johnson has ruled out approving a budget that makes significant cuts in city services or lays off city workers.
The mayor’s budget proposal asks alderpeople to put their political futures at risk by voting for an unpopular property tax hike, but offered nearly nothing in return for City Council members to point to when speaking to angry Chicagoans.
For progressive alderpeople, the spending plan failed to make good on their shared promise with the mayor to invest in working-class Chicagoans by strengthening the city’s social safety net. For more conservative City Council members, the lack of significant cuts in the budget plan made it impossible for them to reassure residents the city was hiking taxes as a last resort.
If the City Council is unwilling to approve a property tax increase, it would have little choice but to make deep cuts in city departments that provide services like tree trimming, garbage pickup and building inspections.
Under the current budget proposal, owners of a property worth $250,000 will likely pay approximately $50 more annually, according to a WTTW News analysis.
However, there are more than 1,000 vacant positions in the Chicago Police Department, which accounts for nearly 46% of Chicago’s discretionary spending, that could be eliminated to save approximately $170 million, according to budget documents.
Since it will be nearly impossible for the city to fill all of those vacancies during 2025, some conservative members of the City Council said they were open to using those funds to balance the budget without a property tax hike. But such a move would no doubt draw the ire of the politically powerful Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge 7.
Johnson, who has faced unrelenting criticism that he wants to “defund the police,” said he would consider that proposal, noting several times it had been floated by some of the most conservative, pro-police members of the City Council as an alternative to a property tax hike.
While it is not clear a budget that makes such significant cuts to CPD could pass the City Council, it would eliminate the need for a property tax hike.
The City Council could also balance the budget by canceling a plan to pay an additional $272 million into the city’s four underfunded pension funds. But that is likely to exacerbate the city's pension crisis and could prove costly in the long run.
Johnson again defended his handling of the negotiations over the city’s 2025 spending plan, referring to himself as the “collaborator in chief” and disputing suggestions that City Hall has been engulfed in chaos. The mayor on Friday declined to identify something he regrets doing as part of the budget negotiations.
Instead, Johnson has said alderpeople were struggling to adapt to his more democratic approach after decades of mayors who refused to tolerate any opposition to their spending plans.
Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd Ward), a frequent critic of Johnson, said the budget crisis is the fault of the mayor.
“The mayor has called himself the collaborator in chief, and he’s collaborated himself into a budget impasse,” Reilly said. “Had there been any level of collaboration, he probably could have avoided this situation.”
Reilly said he was open to averting a property tax hike by eliminating some vacant positions in the police department, but only those earmarked for non-sworn employees, not officers, or positions that cannot realistically be filled in the next 12 months.
Ald. Maria Hadden (49th Ward), the co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, said Chicago was in a very “vulnerable position” as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office after promising to target Chicagoans.
“Every day that we’re here, we’re not doing things in our wards,” Hadden said. “And when we are not doing things in our wards, I’m also not helping my constituents prepare for what’s coming, whether it is the LGTBQ community, whether it is undocumented folks. We have a lot of fear and anxieties about what’s happening.”
Chicago’s budget is now three weeks overdue, fueling a growing sense that Johnson, elected to lead Chicago into a new era of progressive governance, is incapable of keeping those promises and governing responsibly.
If the City Council and mayor cannot craft a budget deal by Dec. 31, the city would find itself in an unprecedented crisis.
Officials cannot pass a short-term ordinance to keep City Hall functioning while negotiations continue, Budget Director Annette Guzman said. That means without a budget deal, more than 30,000 workers will not be paid, starting next month, and city services will stop.
“Nobody in city government wants to see thousands of workers without a paycheck and millions of residents without city services,” Johnson said. “So we’re going to work hard this weekend.”
Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone | (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]
