The leaves are starting to change in Chicago, and Mayor Brandon Johnson is about to kick off a fall budget fight that will test his political savvy at least as much as his ability to balance the city’s books.
To close a $1.15 billion 2026 funding gap by the end of the year, the freshman chief executive will have to dance through a minefield. He faces a restive crew of aldermen who are deeply skeptical of the mayor’s political standing, labor groups whose continued support may hinge on Johnson sparing their city union jobs and grassroots activists trying to push him left to live up to his “tax the rich” pledges while the business community chafes against those hopes.
Looming over all of these dynamics is the countdown to 2027, when the mayor and aldermen are on the ballot and budget decisions for 2026 such as tax increases will still be fresh in Chicagoans’ minds.
“Voters’ memories are short. … The closer you get to an election, the more in focus those decisions become,” Aviva Bowen, a Democratic political strategist, said. “The budget crisis wasn’t created overnight, but the mayor’s shaky standing with voters and City Council has completely poisoned the process, and what you have now is the perfect storm at the worst possible time.”
Johnson’s ongoing opposition to raising property taxes or instituting layoffs — traditionally two reliable but politically perilous ways to fill the budget hole — along with his uneasy relationships with many aldermen and Springfield leaders will likely complicate his path to the 26 council votes he needs. The final version of the 2026 budget passed by aldermen may end up unrecognizable from the mayor’s proposal he will unveil mid-October.
That could be by design.
“It is my responsibility to present a budget,” Johnson said after he struggled last year to get a council majority for a 2025 budget. “It is the City Council’s responsibility to pass that budget.”
Asked Thursday how he views this year’s proposal, the mayor described his proposition as aspirational. The final product will be “a collective response,” he said.
“The hope is that the people who represent the people of Chicago in the City Council see the values we are putting forward,” he said.
Johnson’s leadership style is indeed a break from prior Chicago mayors domineering over negotiations that largely ended with their original proposal, plus modest tweaks. And the risk is that the process could devolve into chaos with competing interests fighting for their own priorities and nobody on the fifth floor with the strength to rein it in.
But relinquishing control could also allow the mayor to publicly wash his hands of the backlash against unpopular choices in the finished budget — and give aldermen cover to vote for a plan that’s harder for mayoral foes to label as “Brandon’s budget.”
“He’s saying he’s more democratic, but is he also just passing the buck? That is a relevant question,” said Rebecca Williams, a political consultant who works with progressive candidates. “But I do see that recognizing the democracy involved in the choice in and of itself lifts some of the burden of it just being the mayor’s budget.”
This week, a final wrap-up of council business before the mayor introduces his opening 2026 plan only added to the immediate tab.
Aldermen are now set to blow past an Oct. 1 state deadline for the city to maintain a 1% grocery tax, worth roughly $80 million a year. If the council takes it up during the budget, collections would not start until midway through 2026.
And they passed a $90 million “global” settlement, to be paid next year, to alleged victims of disgraced Sgt. Ronald Watts. The city expects the settlement will save even more in the long run, but it adds to the deficit.
Johnson and others have acknowledged democratizing the budget would be messy. It was clear this week as aldermen squabbled over, but ultimately did not bring for a full City Council vote, a proposal that would open the door to video gambling in the city. Johnson’s administration is opposed, citing small returns and the threat of cannibalizing revenues from the Bally’s casino.
Looking ahead, the budget power dynamics between the mayor and aldermen could be more fluid than ever.
Ald. Gilbert Villegas, 36th, a centrist who voted against the budget last year, said discussions among his colleagues have begun.
“It’s incumbent upon the legislative branch to have its own ideas as well,” he said. Given the mayor’s opposition to a property tax hike, “you’re going to see more City Council members getting together to figure out what’s the best approach.”
Civic Federation President Joe Ferguson said he expected it this year’s budget to be “very different from the historical norm, somewhat akin to last year and maybe even more so.” Given the scale of the gap, the mayor might toss the “hot potato” into aldermen’s laps, he said.
“The politics of this appears to be that the mayor is going to take a hard line on property taxes and leave it to the council, knowing that the council may have almost no choice but to breach the no-property-tax-increase principle,” Ferguson said.
But there are several hurdles to the council flexing its independence. Aside from a unified opposition to last year’s property tax hike, broad alliances are rare. There are often divisions within the city’s ethnic and ideological caucuses. Last budget, for example, Ald. Andre Vasquez, 40th, broke with the rest of the Progressive Caucus and voted no.
There’s also the more basic infrastructure problem: Aldermen are at the mayor’s mercy to access ongoing budget data, crunch numbers and assess the impact of new proposals. They rely on a small office of financial analysis and separate legislative reference bureau to draft amendments.
Many are hoping a commissioned analysis from Ernst & Young will yield ideas, but some aldermen are worried Johnson’s administration would edit out proposals they don’t like before releasing a final report.
Regardless of the internal strife, the council and the mayor have few voter-friendly options to close the gap and plenty of outside groups are prepping pressure campaigns for and against various budget options.
One Future Illinois, a fundraising and advocacy group launched by business and civic leaders, commissioned a poll and briefed aldermen on its results earlier this month. It largely mirrored the group’s pro-business and “cuts first” perspective: 80% of respondents were opposed to a property tax hike tied to the rate of inflation, 62% were against a per-employee head tax, and 73% opposed a higher garbage fee.
The poll — from the firm Change Research, which had a margin of error of 3.7% — suggested taxes on sports betting and fines for loud vehicles, or placing digital ads on public property would pass muster. But those would not make a significant dent in the deficit.
One Future’s president, Michael Ruemmler, said the poll is not a warning from the group that aldermen should stay away from tax hikes, “it’s a warning from everyday Chicagoans. We just want to make sure their voices are amplified in this process.”
A separate poll taken in early September reflects an age-old truism: Voters support cuts to budgets, but not to services the public relies on. It also highlights what little trust the respondents have in both the mayor and the City Council to dig out of the city’s deep structural deficit.
That poll of 601 registered Chicago voters by the firm Hart Research Associates found respondents were nearly equally split on what concerned them more: a government going too far by cutting key services (37%) or by raising taxes on people and businesses (39%).
It was commissioned by Leading a Better Chicago, a civic advocacy group launched by Bill Quinlan, an attorney best known recently for representing former Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez. Quinlan has been a rumored mayoral candidate as well.
The poll, he said, was commissioned to understand public beliefs and what residents would be willing to accept to prevent the city from entering into a “death spiral.”
Among some of the more acceptable budget solutions: 67% favor increasing taxes on alcohol, cigarettes and marijuana and 59% support allowing video gambling in bars and restaurants (One Future’s poll put support for that at 70%). A per-employee head tax on businesses garnered 38% support (26% in the One Future poll), a sales tax on online subscriptions garnered about 30% and raising property taxes by $300 million — Johnson’s proposal last year — got just 12% support. Questions about specific budget options weren’t put to all 601 respondents, but were split between half of the respondents. That brings the poll’s 4% margin of error up to 5.7% for those questions.
Seventy-one percent also agreed that they would “respect elected leaders who would have the honesty to make taxes a part of the budget discussion.”
That same poll says just 34% have a lot or some confidence the mayor could help solve Chicago’s budget deficit and long-term fiscal problems. For the City Council, the figure is 26%.
Ald. Silvana Tabares, 23rd, said a common polling phenomenon — that respondents like their own representative, but not the governing body as a whole — is in play. “I think there’s a big trust issue with the mayor’s office. With the residents, they don’t trust the mayor. They trust more their alderperson.”
Quinlan said the poll suggests the mayor and aldermen will be rewarded for honesty. “My advice to them would be: Do the right thing, get the city on the right path and not worry about reelection. Good government is good politics. When people recognize we are on the precipice of this financial disaster, they want to hear straight talk.”
Johnson, a labor leader before he was mayor, will be hard-pressed to make cuts. He ran, in part, on unwinding budget cuts made to city mental health clinics during Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s 2011 budget.
Anders Lindall, spokesman for AFSCME Council 31, said even if Johnson reversed his long-standing support of labor, sweeping cuts to “every penny of corporate funding” to the Streets and Sanitation, Transportation, Public Health, Animal Control departments would not only result in “no garbage pickup, no street repair, no mental health clinics, no building inspectors,” it wouldn’t even close the gap.
“You’d have chaos and you’d still have a budget hole,” Lindall said.
Some cuts have the full-throated support of Johnson’s progressive base to come up with more money to spend on the policies he campaigned on. Activist groups are lobbying the mayor to slash police spending to get the cash.
“Now is really the time to fight for the things that progressives who went into City Hall ran on, promised,” said Asha Ransby-Sporn, a lead organizer for the Public Health and Safety for Chicago campaign.
The Police Department is by far the city’s most costly department, but many aldermen have resisted any reductions to front-line cop staffing.
The mayor’s most-coveted solution, either a check or a green light to tax the rich from Springfield, appears unlikely. His consistent drumbeat for progressive revenue — and permission from state leaders to raise it — has not moved the needle there.
Johnson has made assurances that he will readily pull other less controversial levers, including a large sweep of TIF funds. He has also expressed willingness to update other fines and fees to match the rate of inflation.
But he has publicly ruled out a property tax hike, after aldermen unanimously rejected his $300 million increase for 2025.
His reluctance to again try the property tax third rail could mean Johnson sees the writing on the wall in terms of his faltering political capital. No mayor since Richard M. Daley has convinced aldermen to approve a property tax hike less than two years out from reelection.
Complicating things further for him, Johnson campaigned on holding the line on property taxes during the 2023 election.
That pitch surely helped his bold progressive brand catch fire.
But it was always going to come back to be a problem, said 17th Ward Ald. David Moore: “It’s not even about the politics … it’s going to eventually happen. It’s gonna catch up with you.”