Coming off a bruising budget season, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson will spend the next few months trying to claw back revenue from the state, spark a new funding stream for the city by taxing hemp and chip away at some progressive priorities on public safety, the environment and housing.
That’s what’s outlined in Johnson’s policy agenda for the first quarter of this year, which his office has been presenting to select alderpersons, state lawmakers and community partners.
Johnson’s wishlist at City Hall includes proposals for stricter reporting requirements for Chicago Police under a watered-down Anjanette Young ordinance; more affordable housing units through a green social housing loan fund; codified environmental protections like requiring an impact study for intensive land use; and bringing in revenue by taxing the sale of hemp and licensing retailers.
As for the Illinois statehouse, Johnson’s agenda would take baby steps toward increased revenue for Chicago by reversing changes to the state’s telecommunications tax and a corporate revenue tax. Johnson’s team will also look to secure a greater share of funding from the Regional Transit Authority to address local transit woes, though details on that strategy are so far scarce.
Notably, the lobbying priorities shared with WBEZ lack a big progressive revenue push in the way Johnson has promised that would greatly improve the city’s pocketbook or that of two sister agencies, Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Transit Authority.
“There’s no major revenue initiative here that would make a material difference in the city of Chicago’s budget in the next year or two,” said Ralph Martire, the executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability.
Johnson’s chief of external affairs, Kennedy Bartley, notes this is just the first-quarter agenda and promises more to come.
“I think that this is reflective of this administration being a transformative one, meaning that it all doesn’t happen in one year,” Bartley said in an interview with WBEZ. “It happens over the course of an arc.”
Bartley said the goal is for all of these items to be introduced, not necessarily passed into law, by March.
Johnson’s proposal to tax hemp is by far the boldest, and perhaps most challenging, pitch he’ll swing for this spring. State lawmakers, City Council members and industry groups are divided over whether the state should take the lead on licensing and testing, while others want to see an outright ban over public safety concerns.
Beyond managing relationships in City Hall and Springfield, Johnson will also play constant defense against the Trump administration. This week alone, Chicago was the backdrop of targeted immigration raids and Johnson was called to testify before Congress as part of a House GOP probe into sanctuary cities, while a potential federal funding freeze caused confusion and whiplash over billions in grants.
“I think that this Quarter One legislative agenda is reflective of the fact that we will not cower, despite what the backdrop of our country is,” Bartley said.
Here’s a look at Johnson’s primary plans:
Taxing and regulating hemp sales
Faced with the need to create more revenue streams, licensing retailers and taxing the sale of hemp products could bring in millions in revenue in its first year, estimates Ald. William Hall, 6th Ward, a Johnson ally who has pushed for the regulations.
To overcome public safety concerns, the Johnson administration is exploring restricting the sale of hemp products to those age 21 and older, establishing testing and maximum dosage requirements, prohibiting packaging that mimics candy, adding point-of-sale warnings and introducing scalable fines and a “three-strike” rule for enforcement.
“How are we ensuring that we are regulating a sizable and growing industry in a way that doesn’t unnecessarily create winners and losers within the industry but primarily keeps young people and other vulnerable populations safe?” Bartley said.
Alds. Marty Quinn, 13th Ward, and Silvana Tabares, 23rd Ward, already banned the sale of hemp in their wards, and more alderpersons have filed legislation to follow suit.
Other enforcement measures floated Thursday include licensing hemp retailers similarly to alcohol and tobacco, allowing aldermanic input on license approval, distance restrictions near schools and day cares, and additional restrictions on locations with on-site consumption.
“I think what’s most important in this situation is to always keep the voice of the alderman at the table,” Hall said in an interview with WBEZ. “If there’s no recommendation from [the] community and alder, then the license doesn’t come.”
With efforts underway at the state level, some alderpersons want the city to press pause.
State Rep. La Shawn Ford, D-Chicago, said an outright ban on hemp amounts to “prohibition.” He’s proposing hemp licensing, testing and regulations be set by the state, while still allowing cities to still have a say over where stores are located and share in revenue.
“We need to have uniformity,” Ford said.
Meanwhile, Gov. JB Pritzker is backing a hemp regulation bill sponsored by State Sen. Kimberly Lightford, after a previous version of the bill that would largely limit sales of hemp products to licensed cannabis dispensaries died in the lame duck session earlier this month. The defeat was a rare Springfield victory for Johnson, who lobbied against the bill.
Capping the losses corporations can claim on state taxes
Johnson will also push state lawmakers on a bill to lower the cap on how much in net losses a corporation can claim year over year when they pay taxes on their income.
That’s after a previous $100,000 cap on claimed losses expired and jumped to $500,000, according to the Illinois Department of Revenue. As a result, corporations are “applying larger-than-normal losses against positive income,” and that has meant less revenue for the city, briefing materials stated.
Overall, though, corporate tax revenues are seeing steep declines across the country after a major spike in 2022, amid hyperinflation where corporate profits skyrocketed, Martire said.
Changing the cap in losses a corporation can claim would be a drop in the bucket of those major declines, Martire said.
“It’s not done declining. So, even if the state makes the adjustment the city’s asking for, this revenue source is going down, not up,” Martire said.
Johnson also hopes to restore another $40 million to city coffers by amending the state’s prepaid cellphone tax. The city lost that money last year when lawmakers passed a bill without the language.
Anjanette Young ordinance
Johnson is pushing a long-stalled ordinance meant to reform search warrant practices by the Chicago Police Department, but the current draft leaves out a major prong from earlier proposals: a ban on no-knock warrants.
In May, the judge overseeing the federal consent decree of the Chicago Police Department declined to ban no-knock warrants outright or to tightly restrict when officers can execute them. Anjanette Young, who was the victim of a wrongful police raid that captured the nation’s attention in 2019, said she believes that decision makes a ban on no-knock warrants unlikely to pass council.
Ald. Maria Hadden, 49th Ward, who has been pushing for a no-knock ban with Young for years, distanced herself from the decision to exclude a ban from the current draft. She pointed questions to Johnson’s team: “I’ll leave that to the administration,” she said. Hadden added she still supports the new version of the proposal.
The current draft, which hasn’t been introduced or viewed by WBEZ, focuses on reporting requirements around police search warrants and other activity, Young said. For instance, police would need to publicly report which judge approved their warrant and what materials were provided to support the warrant, as well as warrant denials.
“Right now, everything is happening behind closed doors, and we don’t have the actual numbers to be able to hold them accountable for their actions,” Young said.
Young campaigned for Johnson on the condition he would push for reforms to the police department’s search warrant practices. She says she is glad to see her ordinance is a priority for him, even as her patience has worn thin.
“My hopes were that it would be done in his first 100 days,” Young said.
Green social housing
An offshoot of Johnson’s $1.25 billion–dollar borrowing plan would establish a “green social housing” program to increase the supply of affordable housing that meets environmental standards. The model allows the city to issue loans to developers, who would then sell the buildings back to the city, according to a summary of the bond program. The bond would seed a $135 million loan program, and there would be “a minimum 30% of income-restricted affordable units, 70% rent-stabilized market rate units,” according to the mayor’s office’s briefing materials. It could increase the housing department’s housing production by up to 50%.
Rent paid on units and loans being paid back to the city would help the program be self-sustaining — a key feature that will help the city grow its affordable housing supply even in the face of federal funding threats, said Jimmy Rothschild, an organizer for housing and economic justice at the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs.
“This is why this self-sustaining model … [is] so crucial in an environment where sort of everything else is kind of uncertain,” Rothschild said.
Cumulative impacts ordinance
Another policy priority that aims to reduce the disproportionate pollution communities face is passing a cumulative impacts ordinance. The proposal would codify key terms, like “environmental justice” and “cumulative impact assessment,” establish an advisory board with both historically underrepresented communities and business leadership, and require cumulative impact studies and specific zoning designations for heavy and intensive land uses, according to briefing materials.
The ordinance builds off a pledge for the city to reform its planning, zoning and land-use practices after facing a HUD investigation over practices that advocacy groups said perpetuated environmental racism. The city completed its first cumulative impact assessment in 2023 to determine the impact of pollution on different communities.
Oscar Sanchez, the co-executive director of the Southeast Environmental Task Force, said the ordinance has been “a long time coming.”
“The community is desperately asking for government intervention and a due process to ensure public health is uplifted,” Sanchez said.
What others like — and see lacking — in Johnson’s plans
Whether Johnson can deliver on these goals, with the help of a City Council that has grown more politically oppositional over the course of his term, is a big question.
Some alderpersons contacted by WBEZ bristled at the fact that they hadn’t been briefed on the mayor’s legislative agenda already. The mayor’s office briefed their close allies in the Progressive, Black and Latino caucuses first and will brief all alderpersons by next Friday, Bartley said.
Ald. Scott Waguespack, 32nd Ward, a critic of Johnson’s, had not gotten a briefing invitation as of Thursday afternoon but reviewed agenda documents obtained by WBEZ. He said some of the items, like the cumulative impact studies and green social housing program, will be light lifts.
He was disappointed to not see more detailed plans on how the mayor’s office wants to fight for funding at CPS or the CTA, both of which face major fiscal cliffs as federal COVID-19 funding dwindles.
“Maybe that’s something that came out in the briefings, but I don’t understand why they can’t get their act together,” he said. “I thought maybe I didn’t print both pages when I first printed it out. And I was like, where’s the other half of this?”
Martire echoed Waguespack’s surprise. Missing from the Springfield agenda, Martire said, were major structural proposals that would create meaningful new revenue streams for Chicago.
One such change, he said, would be expanding the state’s sales tax to include services, not just products. In Illinois, for instance, residents pay a tax to buy a lawnmower but not to pay to have their lawn mowed.
“We tax less economic activity in the modern economy than virtually every other state with a sales tax,” Martire said.
Bartley said proposals on a service tax or an increase to the share of money the city receives from the state’s local government fund — both of which could rake in tens of millions more for Chicago — could be on the table in the months to come.
While the city will have a hard time winning support at the statehouse for new revenue streams, Ford said the mayor’s office has “learned from the errors of their ways” and started advocating for their priorities earlier than last year.
Ald. Gilbert Villegas, 36th Ward, said the Springfield legislative agenda “is exactly what we should have been focused on last year as well,” when Johnson was pushing for state lawmakers to approve billions in subsidies for a new Bears stadium.
“They don’t need the mayor to be another lobbyist for the Bears,” Villegas said.
Asha Ransby-Sporn, an organizer who has worked on progressive campaigns for Bring Chicago Home and Treatment Not Trauma, said she’s glad to see that none of the agenda hinges on federal funding at risk under the Trump administration, saying “that in particular makes a lot of sense.”
But she notes there’s a “much longer list” of progressive policies to push for next, such as reining in police overtime spending or the practice of “trolling,” where officers allegedly make arrests toward the end of their shift to rake in overtime pay.
Hadden said she believes there’s “a strong group in council, not just amongst the progressives,” who will support Johnson’s first-quarter agenda at City Hall. But the challenge will be avoiding political firestorms or self-inflicted wounds while beating back Trump administration attacks.
“Like, what’s the president going to do next week?” Hadden said. “I do think that we can get — he can get — the support to move those things forward, hopefully, while minimizing distractions that are unrelated to the mission at hand.”
Mariah Woelfel and Tessa Weinberg cover Chicago government and politics for WBEZ.