After calling off budget vote to avoid certain defeat, Mayor Johnson must consider ideas he had ruled out

Mayor Brandon Johnson‘s decision Friday to call off a budget vote he was certain to lose leaves the embattled mayor with no choice but to consider program cuts, unpaid furlough days and other options he has so far refused to entertain.

Without deep spending cuts and shared sacrifice, Johnson’s $68.5 million property tax increase — pared back from his original proposal of a $300 million tax hike — could not attract enough aldermanic support to garner overall budget approval. After days of frenzied lobbying, he had only 19 rock-solid votes

The search for at least seven more votes to get to the 26 needed for passage is all but certain to require the mayor to scrap the property tax increase altogether, eliminate the $50 million he hoped to spend to create 2,000 more summer youth jobs and remove his line in the sand on any layoffs or other cost-cutting options that could alienate the unions that helped elect him.

Johnson is now operating from a position of weakness. He's no longer calling the shots; the City Council is.

Civic Federation President Joe Ferguson said all it would take to get Johnson’s $17.3 billion budget over the finish line is $150 million worth of cuts.

That sounds like a lot. But it isn’t when you consider the city's budget is 47% higher than it was pre-pandemic, not counting pension costs.

“To say there is no option in the way of … workforce reductions [and] shared sacrifice is just not playing ball with folks that are trying to come to some form of common ground,” Ferguson said.

By “shared sacrifice,” Ferguson means “furloughs and altered schedules — not just with exempt employees and senior employees, but with the labor unions who, I’m sure at this point, understand that we are in a place we’ve never been before.”

“If you look there, you are immediately looking at tens of millions of dollars,” he said.

Council dean Ald. Walter Burnett (27th), who serves as Johnson’s de facto floor leader, agreed.

“ Furlough days may be what we have to do. That means everybody in the city takes a part in this. I think that’s fair,” Burnett said.

Johnson vowed to work through the weekend to forge a compromise in hopes of passing the budget when the Council reconvenes Monday.

The mayor said he's open to all ideas, including scrapping the $68.5 million property tax increase.

“We are not Congress. We don’t mint money. If there’s no budget by the end of the year, there’s no appropriations for services to continue,” Johnson said.

Budget Director Annette Guzman said the Council doesn't have "continuing appropriation authority" and must, by state law, pass a budget by Dec. 31.

“Whether we are going to levy any property tax — whether it’s the existing property tax we have in place today — we have to have that in place by the end of this year, or we’re not able to do things like pay our debt service, pay our pensions," she said.

Determined to avoid a drop in the city’s credit rating that could make it more expensive for the city to borrow, Johnson has declared off limits a $272 million advance payment to the four city employee pension funds. But Wall Street is watching, and the marathon budget stalemate likely will cause that drop anyway. Shrinking the pension advance therefore becomes more likely.

So does eliminating thousands of vacancies.

“Looking at the police vacancies that we know are not going to be filled in the next year, which is about $170 million — you can find $70 million out of that. Then, those who want to do zero property tax can actually say if they’re really about that or not,” said Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Andre Vasquez (40th).

Downtown Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd) agreed eliminating police vacancies “we know we can’t fill” must be considered, calling it a “pretty big concession” from his “pro-police and pro-public safety" coalition.

“This is a fair compromise to allow us to plug this gap with the implicit understanding that we could come back and restore those [police] positions next year,” Reilly said.

But Ferguson said the “dirty little secret” is that money from those unfilled police vacancies is kept in the budget to help cover overtime, which totaled $283 million just last year.

Eliminating those vacancies could leave the Chicago Police Department, which has about 2,000 fewer officers than just a few years ago, with no way to cover overtime for special events and tamping down summer violence.

The mayor’s proposed 2025 budget already includes $75 million in savings from unfilled vacancies, leaving $95 million in potential savings from eliminating police vacancies.

Johnson said he’d consider eliminating police vacancies, but noted the proposal originated with Reilly and Ald. Anthony Beale (9th).

Both are in the 14-member “Common Sense Caucus” demanding deeper spending cuts. .

“We’re going to get rid of your $50 million additional summer [jobs] program. We’re going to get rid of Walter Burnett’s $400,000 fund [in the vice mayor’s office]. We’re going to tell the departments, 'Here’s your budget from 2020, plus the cost of inflation going forward. That’s your number. Figure it out,'" Beale said.

Johnson vowed to “hold firm and strong and steady” on creating 2,000 more summer youth jobs.

Another idea that could be resurrected is raising the $9.50-a-month garbage collection fee, frozen since its inception nearly a decade ago. The Black Caucus calls the fee regressive.

But Ferguson said the opposition to an increase may have been overstated.

Vasquez urged the Johnson administration to use the time until Monday's meeting for “good-faith conversations with people who would support a reasonable budget if they found more efficiencies."

Johnson expects to have “quite a time this weekend bringing people together," he said. “I have a responsibility. City Council has a responsibility.

"Nobody in city government wants to see thousands of workers without a paycheck and millions of residents without city services. So we’re gonna work hard this weekend."