In the past, when the unhappy need has arisen for tax hikes in Chicago, mayors took the lead in making and communicating those inherently unpopular proposals.
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Brandon Johnson portrays himself as a different kind of mayor, emphasizing his desire for “collaboration” in solving the city’s problems. That approach, it seems, extends to new taxes.
The mayor would prefer others determine where to get — or, more accurately, who will pay — the hundreds of millions he says he needs to finance his progressive initiatives. Enter the subcommittee on revenue.
In a session with journalists Friday to discuss his proposed budget, Johnson was asked repeatedly about the status of his many plans, from restoring mental health clinics to instituting a permanent guaranteed-income program for lower-income residents. The answer came back repeatedly: That’s the job of the subcommittee on revenue.
This panel “will be essential to budgets to come,” he said.
His first budget, thankfully, was devoid of tax increases. He resorted to some time-honored methods such as reclaiming money set aside in tax-increment financing districts to balance the ledgers.
And he emphasized, we noted with interest, his opposition to property tax hikes, identifying them as a leading cause of Black migration out of the city. “If pensioners left my neighborhood,” he said, referring to Austin on the West Side, “my neighborhood would collapse.”
Normally, and understandably, aldermen want no part of leading on tax hikes. So who in this case are the lucky winners? There are 17 City Council members on the newly formed revenue panel, chaired by a freshman alderman, William Hall. The Chatham resident represents the 6th Ward on the South Side, including parts of Woodlawn and Englewood.
It will be Hall and co.’s job, apparently not Johnson’s, to “get the money,” as the pro-Johnson Action Center on Race & the Economy memorably put it in a May report offering the new mayor numerous possibilities to tax businesses and the wealthy.
No doubt we’ll be hearing plenty from this apparently all-important subcommittee in the months to come. Johnson in the Friday session said he also is urging corporate leaders in town to offer their ideas on where to get the money.
Call us old-fashioned — and we’re all for collaboration — but it’s the mayor’s job to lead on something as important as hiking taxes, whether it’s $50 million to fill a budget gap or hundreds of millions to finance an ambitious agenda. It’s then his task to persuade a majority of 50 alderman to sign off and explain to Chicagoans why he had no choice but to raid their pocketbooks.
The mayor seems to want to make it easy on himself. Let aldermen take the heat for proposing tax hikes and then pick and choose among those ideas, as if they were a box of chocolates.
It’s all well and good, indeed commendable, to seek broad input before proposing new taxes. But taxes are the mayor’s job.
Not the job of a City Council subcommittee.
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