Mayor Brandon Johnson got the message on the first day of budget hearings that his $300 million property tax increase wouldn’t fly.
But just in case it wasn’t abundantly clear, the City Council delivered that message again Thursday in the loudest of political terms.
The increase that would have broken one of Johnson’s most fundamental campaign promises was shot down, with no debate, 50-0.
The unanimous vote was largely symbolic. Negotiations aimed at reducing or eliminating the property tax increase and replacing it with a healthy mix of new revenues and reprogrammed federal pandemic relief funds began last weekend.
But mayoral allies and critics alike nevertheless seized the opportunity to score political points with angry constituents struggling to hold onto their homes and businesses after reassessment increases and two straight years of up-to-the-limit property tax hikes to bankroll Chicago Public Schools.
Thursday’s vote also was perhaps the strongest sign yet that Johnson’s anemic public approval ratings have emboldened the Council to stop taking its marching orders from the mayor’s office.
“This is a defeat of epic proportions,” Southwest Side Ald. Marty Quinn (13th) told the Sun-Times in the run-up to Thursday’s vote.
“The mayor can spin it and portray himself as Mayor Collaborator all he wants. But in reality, within a week’s time, his budget will have been voted down. That is hugely significant for a City Council that is growing more independent. It can’t be under-stated.”
Thirty-one alderpersons had signed onto the call for the special meeting to prevent Johnson from running out the clock and forcing the council into a corner just to get the budget approved by the legal deadline of Dec. 31.
They were afraid that Johnson pushed back his budget address by two weeks in a sinister attempt to drag the final vote into the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. That could have forced alderpersons to choose between a $300 million property tax increase and a first-ever budget shutdown.
Johnson and his top mayoral aides flatly deny that dire scenario.
They insist they made no attempt to block Thursday’s vote and do not view it as an embarrassment. In fact, Johnson told reporters on Tuesday that he was never serious about the $300 million property tax increase and made it a centerpiece of his $17.3 billion budget, simply to get Council’s attention and shock them into proposing serious revenue-raising alternatives.
“As a public school teacher, sometimes we do things to get people’s attention, and so now that we have everyone’s attention, I’ve said from the very beginning this is a proposal. I’m a collaborative mayor, for the first time in the history of Chicago, you’re actually seeing that type of collaborative approach,” Johnson told reporters earlier this week.
The mayor said then he is open to a “plethora of ideas” so long as they don’t compromise his core “values.” That means “investing in people” — through summer jobs, community safety, behavioral health and affordable housing — while avoiding layoffs and furlough days.
Another must-have is keeping the $272 million advance payment on city pensions. That amount is in addition to the annual contribution to those four city employee pension funds mandated by state law. Johnson calls the extra payment important to repair the “structural damage” done by predecessors who allowed the city’s pension crisis to fester.
Reducing the pension advance initiated by former Mayor Lori Lightfoot and continued by Johnson would not only “damage the city’s credibility with rating agencies,” jeopardizing the all important bond rating that determines city borrowing costs. It would “increase future contributions by the city” and dramatically reduce long-term savings generated by early retirement of the city’s pension debt.
“If we don’t repair the structural damage, we’re gonna continue down this pathway of insolvency. The advance payment is really an opportunity for us to save taxpayer dollars in the long-run. We’re talking conservatively $3 billion,” the mayor said Tuesday.
Chief Financial Officer Jill Jaworski noted the state mandate contribution is “still insufficient to stop pension liabilities from growing.”
“We don’t view the supplemental payment as really a supplement. It’s what we need to put into our pension funds to stabilize them and stop the bleeding,” Jaworski said earlier this week.
Vote is ‘a welcome excercise,’ top Johnson aide says
Hours before the unanimous vote, Chief External Affairs Officer Kennedy Bartley flatly denied that the decision to reject the $300 million property tax increase that would have broken one of Johnson’s most important campaign promises was an embarrassment to the mayor.
Bartley said there was “no directive or attempt to stop this meeting from happening.” In fact, the Johnson administration “encouraged even allies to take whatever vote they feel like they need to take to kind of show their constituencies that they’re doing the hard work…collaborating on a budget that works for all Chicago.”
“It’s a welcome exercise…I would hardly call it an embarrassment,” she said.
During the 1980’s power struggle known as “Council Wars” that saw alderpersons led by then Alderpersons Edward Vrdolayk (10th) and Edward Burke (14th) thwart then-Mayor Harold Washington’s very move, the “Vrdolyak 29” introduced their own budget to counter Washington’s spending plan.
That was the only other time in recent memory that the City Council has attempted to wrest control over the budget away from the mayor.
But, Bartley said the Council’s growing independence has been brewing since 2015, when then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel chose political retirement over, what would have been an uphill battle for a third term after the court-ordered release of the Laquan McDonald shooting video.
“Mayor Emanuel not running for re-election was representative of a change in tide…There was a shift in culture towards more independence,” Bartley said.
“A lot of us who are in government now have spent so much of our time…calling for greater independence and calling for greater transparency and transformation. So, we certainly can’t flinch when we’re seeing it.”
‘We had the votes and he did not’
Ald. Anthony Beale (9th), who spearheaded the call for Thursday’s special meeting, cautioned his constituents not to be fooled by Johnson’s early retreat.
“He’s given up on the property tax increase because he knows we had the votes and he did not,” Beale told the Sun-Times.
Although the lopsided vote is no surprise, Beale said it’s “still historic for us to be finally exerting the power we’ve had all along.”
Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd) said the $300 million property tax increase “never should have been proposed in the first place.” He noted that the Johnson administration “immediately retreated and promised a much smaller increase within days” of the mayor’s budget address.
“If they’re able to retreat that quickly to a much lower number, how much better can we do if we continue to negotiate and force the question on cutting expenses and not talking about new revenue?” Reilly said Thursday.
“This mayor seems to think that every city job is an entitlement and that these are sacred cows that can’t be touched.”
Proposed budget amendment would restore ShotSpotter
As negotiations continue to cobble together an alternative package of tax increases, fund transfers and budget cuts, 32 alderpersons are introducing a budget amendment that would increase city spending by $15.8 million.
Of that money, $6.9 million would be used to restore the ShotSpotter contract that Johnson has canceled and earmark the remaining $8.9 million for the gunshot detection system chosen after a so-called “request for information” issued by the Johnson administration.