CHICAGO — Fifteen City Council members on Tuesday sent a letter to Mayor Brandon Johnson proposing slashing municipal government spending to pre-pandemic levels.
In 2020, the city budget was $11.7 billion. The Chicago budget for 2025 proposed by Mayor Brandon Johnson exceeds $17 billion. To avoid layoffs and furloughs, Johnson has proposed raises property taxes, but City Council rejected his initial request.
“We’re trying to get the administration to shift their priority,” said Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd Ward). “They started out saying, ‘We’re going to raise revenue to fill this deficit and then we’ll talk about cuts to fill the gap that’s left over.’ We want to flip that around. We want to do cuts first, and government efficiencies, and then we’ll talk about revenue to fill whatever the residual gap is.”
Ald. Brenden Reilly (42nd Ward) said the budget talks can’t be just a conversation about new revenue.
“Taxpayers in Chicago are wiped out,” he said.
To help identify areas to cut, Riley sent city budget officials an email requesting information about municipal salaries, current headcount and the number of vacancies the mayor plans to carry over to the next year.
“We want to know if it’s realistic that they will be filled next calendar year,” Reilly told WGN, adding that he’s not received a response to his request.
Behind the scenes, small groups of alders have exchanged ideas with the mayor’s budget team, but so far the mayor is holding to his commitment not to slash jobs.
Hopkins said he expects “very few if any” cuts to currently filled union positions but said there may be some vacant union positions that could be lost through collective bargaining.
“But there’s a lot of management jobs that are not union jobs that were created in the last five years,” he said. “We have to look at every one of them, and my suspicion is many of them are not justified in the post-pandemic era.”
Alders who signed Tuesday’s letter include Hopkins, Reilly, Ald. Anthony Beale (9th Ward), Ald. Peter Chico (10th Ward), Ald. Marty Quinn (13th Ward), Ald. Raymond Lopez (15th Ward), Ald. Derrick Curtis (18th Ward), Ald. Silvana Tabares (23rd Ward), Ald. Monique Scott (24th Ward), Ald. Felix Cardona (31st Ward), Ald. Scott Waguespack (32nd Ward), Ald. Gilbert Villegas (36th Ward), Ald. Anthony Napolitano (41st Ward), Ald. James Gardiner (45th Ward), and Ald. Debra Silverstein (50th Ward).
The City Council has until the end of the year to approve a budget for 2025.
