(The Center Square) – Civic Federation President Joe Ferguson is warning Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to be careful about what he wishes for in proposing a new $300 million property tax increase.
The city faces a nearly $1 billion budget gap for 2025. Johnson, as part of his $17.3 billion budget plan, recently shared intricate details about what would be the city’s largest such hike in nearly a decade.
Ferguson warned of the consequences.
“Nobody knows what the tipping point is. We have seen in recent years that those with the capacity to leave, whether its businesses or its more affluent residents, those with the capacity to leave, a number of them have left,” Ferguson told The Center Square. “We should be worried right now that we are pretty much at that tipping point.”
With the new spending plan coming after Johnson vowed as a candidate that he would not raise property taxes, Ferguson is urging City Council members to do all they can to hold him to his word, including putting forth alternatives that could include hiking sin taxes, raising fees on garbage collection and implementing employee furloughs. As part of his budget proposal, Johnson also said he wants to increase the wholesale transaction prices per gallon of beer by 34%, and by about 35% for other spirits.
“The City Council actually needs to step into its greater authority,” he added. “We should all be looking at the City Council to exercise a much greater role than we are used to them doing. By law, it is the City Council that passes the budget. It is the City Council’s budget.”
Illinois residents already pay the second highest property taxes in the nation.
During his budget address, Johnson argued that, with the budget deficit as large as it is, a property tax hike is the only way to keep things moving. Spending cuts and layoffs, he said, would have a devastating impact on the city’s workforce and services.
The Chicago Tribune reports top administration officials insist the city would have to reduce its workforce by 17% to offset the levels of revenue generated by the increase being proposed, including nearly 2,500 positions within the Chicago Police Department.
Ferguson said cash-strapped residents and property owners have heard it all before.
“It’s an extraordinarily large number that they’ve appeared to land on without necessarily having leaned into all of the other alternatives available,” he added. “There’s only so much blood to be gotten from the turnip here. People are hard pressed and we have said for years at some point we should have a concern about a tipping point where people just throw up their hands and say, ‘it’s too expensive.’ We may be at that point.”
Ferguson argues there’s a good reason why Johnson is sounding a far different tone from the one he was trumpeting just a few months earlier.
“Why he might have gone there may have been the assessment as to the political consequences or capital that he would have had to expend in order to go in a different direction,” he said. “That different direction would have been to actually call upon labor, the unions, to come to the table and be part of the shared burden that is going to be born overall. That was not done.”
For his budget plan to move forward, Johnson will need support from a majority of the city’s 50 aldermen.
