Here’s the question that Chicago City Council members should ask themselves before they vote on that $830 million city infrastructure bond sale on Wednesday:
What’s do I tell my constituents if they ask me why I voted for a proposal that could end up costing them more than twice what they thought it was going to cost?
That’s what’s at stake here with Mayor Brandon Johnson’s controversial bond sale with a financing structure that could cost taxpayers more than $2 billion in the coming decades.
There’s no doubt Chicago has infrastructure needs. Potholes need filling. Crumbling viaducts need repairing. Lead water service lines — Chicago has the worst problem in the nation — need replacing. Police need new squad cars — the list goes on. So some Council members are probably OK with a “Yes” vote, and are willing to cite pressing capital needs as their rationale.
But Council members on the fence should instead think sensibly and put on the brakes. You don’t need to be an expert in municipal finance to see this as a bad idea that needs a serious fix, as this editorial board wrote just days ago.
Johnson defended his plan on Tuesday, saying it’s not a “payday loan,” as the Sun-Times’ Fran Spielman reported.
That still doesn’t make it a smart option.
The mayor wouldn’t back away from the repayment schedule that kicks the can decades down the road: The city would only make payments on interest until 2045, and the loan wouldn’t be fully repaid until 2055. Johnson also refused to cut back on the amount of borrowing. Both would have helped sell the plan to skeptics.
All of which leaves it up to Council members to hold the line once again on Wednesday, as they did last week.
Maybe Johnson and aldermen who support the proposal are thinking it’s all good — they’ll be long gone by the time the city has to shoulder the full financial burden of this borrowing. Meanwhile, they get to take the credit for fixing sidewalk cracks and putting up new streetlights.
That’s the exact sort of short-sighted, self-interested, leave-it-to-the-next-politician-to-fix thinking that has helped put this city in its current shaky fiscal state.
Johnson on Tuesday also repeated what a woman told him at a recent televised forum on WTTW: “She said, ‘Mayor, you need to fix these streets or fix my car. Guess what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna fix the streets.”
Great. Fix the streets. No Chicagoan is going to argue against that; this doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. City Hall has to tackle capital needs sensibly, without overburdening those future generations of Chicagoans who will have to pay for it.
Do some critics of this proposal have mayoral aspirations? Probably. Doesn’t make them wrong.
Remember also the credit-rating agencies, already giving our city the side-eye for its finances. Standard & Poor’s Global, readers might remember, recently lowered Chicago’s bond-rating status to just above junk. How does that help efforts to attract businesses and others looking to put down stakes and invest here?
What happens if, as state Comptroller Susana Mendoza warned, this bond sale passes City Council and leads to “another credit downgrade, plunging the city into junk territory?”
Johnson did do one thing right: He offered to tighten language so that the bond money won’t used for Chicago Public Schools, by helping to make a disputed $175 million pension payment for non-teaching school employees or to help pay for a teachers’ contract. Neither of those qualify as “infrastructure needs.”
Chicago has seen bad fiscal decisions in the past, like the parking meter deal/fiasco and the Soldier Field renovation that taxpayers are still paying off.
It’s up to City Council to ward off another bad deal on Wednesday.
The Sun-Times welcomes letters to the editor and op-eds. See our guidelines.
Get Opinions content delivered to your inbox. Sign up for our weekly newsletter here.
More about the Sun-Times Editorial Board at chicago.suntimes.com/about/editorial-board