Mayor Brandon Johnson on Thursday held a news conference at which he unveiled a new electronic tool for aldermen to submit their ideas for “efficiencies” addressing Chicago’s $1.2 billion budget deficit for next year.
While the mayor spent time on that little stunt, designed to put those aldermen opposed to the mayor’s corporate tax head in an uncomfortable political corner, elsewhere a small group of aldermen interested more in solutions than ideological grandstanding were preparing their own alternative budget.
Led by Ald. Pat Dowell, 3rd, the Finance Committee chair who earlier this week was among 25 on the panel who voted against the mayor’s revenue package, these pragmatists are expected to unveil it as early as Monday.
The Dowell-led group of aldermen aren’t just talking among themselves. We hear they’re huddling with representatives of the business community, leading civic organizations like the Civic Federation and the Commercial Club, and, yes, even people from unions representing city workers.
From what we are given to understand, the head tax will not be part of the Dowell plan. Not at any level. But we are likely to see some of those “efficiencies” the mayor and his supporters on the council keep deriding as impractical or impossible.
Like all Chicagoans worried about the city’s future, we await with anticipation what this rump group will put forward.
We’ve called consistently for shared sacrifice to address the budget crisis, including from a largely unionized city workforce from which Johnson has refused to demand concessions. As we’ve written before, Democratic mayors in numerous other cities have forced unions to the table — often through the threat of layoffs — in order to spare taxpayers from having to shoulder the entire burden of plugging budget holes. To date, Johnson has refused to follow this path.
But he needs at least 25 aldermen to go along with this folly in order to pass a balanced budget by the end of next month, and so far he hasn’t come close to that number. So these responsible aldermen are taking it upon themselves to perform the hard work the mayor’s office ought to be doing.
They deserve our gratitude. And, after they make public their ideas, they surely will need support from the mayor’s budget and finance teams as they go about trying to stitch together a compromise spending plan with the clock ticking toward a Dec. 30 deadline.
If Johnson won’t make the hard choices needed for a balanced budget, at the very least he should make his team available to those doing his job for him. The plain fact of Chicago governance is that only the mayor’s office has the resources and expertise to number-crunch, and council members simply don’t. Until now, Johnson implicitly has held that reality over the heads of his detractors, and his team dutifully has poured cold water on virtually any cost-cutting idea as unrealistic, at least in the current budget.
We say where there’s a will, there’s a way. And to say there has been no will on the fifth floor to honestly assess the ethics and practicality of various cost cuts is an understatement. That must change.
Next week, we hope, will mark the first concrete step to producing a 2026 budget that’s balanced in every sense of the word and that will preserve the city’s wobbly credit rating while giving businesses confidence to invest again in Chicago.
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