Facing a 2025 budget gap of nearly $1 billion, the Johnson administration last week seized every option available to it other than any meaningful concessions from the city’s vast labor force to cover the mayor’s $17.3 billion spending plan. A record-high sweep of unallocated tax increment financing funds? Check. Eliminating unfilled city positions? Check. Forcing an equally fiscally stressed Chicago Public Schools system to absorb a $175 million pension payment the city government has paid in the past? Check. And the piece de resistance: a $300 million property tax hike, the largest since 2016. That was when Mayor Rahm Emanuel won approval of a $316 million increase, by saying it all would be dedicated to shoring up woefully underfunded police and fire pension funds. Brandon Johnson promised during his mayoral campaign not to raise property taxes, noting correctly back then that the levies are regressive and that the city’s lower-income and even middle-income residents are hitting their limit. When property taxes rise, rents increase too, as landlords pass the tax costs along to tenants. The mayor likes to talk about the various campaign promises he’s kept, but breaking this one will trump all those others in the minds of voters. As Johnson well knows, the city of Chicago’s levy is but one piece of a Chicagoan’s property tax bill. Chicago Public Schools hikes its levies to the maximum the law allows every year, and will do so again next year. There’s a triennial reassessment of property values currently underway in Chicago. Next year, that’s widely expected to place more of the total property tax burden on homeowners collectively than they bear now. That’s due to falling property values for many types of commercial property, especially office buildings, following the pandemic. At the same time, residential values have increased. Property taxes are a zero-sum game. Governments get their money no matter what. Assessments determine how the bill is apportioned. In sum — again, as Johnson knows — there’s anger now in Chicago about exorbitant property taxes, and the current level of public ire is likely to spike next year when those taxes go even higher. If the City Council agrees to Johnson’s property tax hike, he will be the person Chicagoans associate with their ballooning tax bills. For a politician with a public approval rating hovering around 14%, that’s politically perilous territory. We met with the mayor last week for the first time since his election — a meeting we were glad to finally have — and we listened to him try to justify the need to ask Chicagoans to dig deeper. He blamed his predecessors for his predicament; they surely bear significant responsibility, some more than others. Emanuel did more than any other mayor, before or since, to get funding of the city’s pension obligations moving in a direction where there’s even a shot of delivering on the city’s obligations to its retired workers. Johnson gives Emanuel no credit for that, but we will. Johnson also blamed unnamed corporations and rich people for opposing efforts to snatch more of their money to fix the city’s fiscal mess. The average Chicago homeowner, Johnson told us, will have to pay $20 more per month if his property tax passes. (Many middle-class households, of course, would see increases far higher than that.) “There’s not a corporation or someone that is ultra-rich that couldn’t give a little bit more of what would be equivalent to $20 a month?” Johnson asked rhetorically. “Someone that is ultra-rich” is a phrase that deftly captures how this mayor thinks about his job — it reflects his desire to find any way possible to force the wealthy, however one defines that term, to part with more of their money. There’s no appreciation that many of those folks already give generously to numerous causes in this city. There’s also no apparent understanding that many if not most of them don’t have to live — and in many cases even work — in Chicago. Another telling part of our conversation: The mayor spoke several times about his budget as if it were the most important driver of economic activity in the city. At $17 billion or so, the city budget certainly is more than a rounding error. But the city’s gross domestic product when last reported was about $830 billion. Government spending isn’t going to quicken the moribund pace of growth in Chicago; only private-sector investment will. And tax receipts would rise correspondingly — if Johnson and his supporters would reassure would-be investors they won’t be subjected to confiscatory tax policies. To his credit, Johnson has announced a few policies to improve the city’s business environment, such as trying to reduce permitting hassles for businesses and developers. But the mayor clearly doesn’t understand how an overwhelming majority of the decision-makers in Chicago’s business community view him. The self-delusion, frankly, is worrying. “Business is confident in my leadership,” Johnson told us. At another point, he said, “Business leaders actually trust this administration.” Sorry, Mr. Mayor, but those statements just aren’t true right now. Business leaders in this city have essentially no confidence in City Hall. You might want to check out some recent statements from the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce and the Civic Committee. They reflect current sentiment. Finally, we asked the same question everyone else is posing, which is why Johnson won’t demand the city’s unionized workers chip in to help close the budget gap. Johnson and his team responded at first that their hands are tied because most unionized workers are operating under settled contracts, which is true as far as it goes. But everything is negotiable, of course. Johnson later allowed that he could use the threat of layoffs to encourage the unions to discuss less draconian measures like furloughs. But again here’s a telling detail of how the mayor thinks about his job: “There’s nothing to stop us from having conversations (with labor),” he said. “Just like there’s nothing stopping us from having conversations with large endowments.” You hear that, University of Chicago and Northwestern University? The mayor was talking about you, as well as other land-owning nonprofits that don’t pay property taxes (but of course contribute mightily to the city’s welfare in numerous other ways), not to mention well-endowed entities like the MacArthur Foundation dedicated to the social good. Get ready for those back-channel discussions to become a lot more public. Aldermen, who already are opposing the mayor on policies and decisions of all sorts, don’t look amenable to this tax hike. They should stick to their guns and force the mayor to find solutions beyond the soak-the-rich dreams that continue to animate this administration. Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email [email protected].