On Thursday, Chicago’s City Council nixed Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposal to hike property taxes on households and businesses by $300 million. The 50-0 vote came without debate and served as a remarkable and deservedly embarrassing rebuke for an unpopular mayor who had campaigned on a categorical pledge not to raise property taxes. Johnson attempted in recent days to spin his massive tax hike as merely a clever device to capture aldermen’s attention about the depth of the city’s budgetary crisis. That is hard to buy. Indeed, when we met with the mayor and some of his budget team just after the Oct. 30 release of his $17.3 billion budget, he convinced us he believed the tax hike was unavoidable. And he made an impassioned case for its implication. So here we are. It’s mid-November and the city is basically at square one on setting a budget for 2025. Now the real work has to start. The unusualness of this state of affairs can’t be overstated. Individual aldermen, from committee chairs to first-termers, will be involved directly in negotiating this budget. Political nerds have told us for years that Chicago’s form of government is strong-council, weak-mayor. But we haven’t seen that dynamic play out in real life since before Richard J. Daley’s time. The mayor’s office has been meeting with aldermen it considers at least reasonably friendly in recent days to take their temperature on an array of alternative revenue generating ideas. Team Johnson has kept the more conservative aldermen who forced Thursday’s vote to nix the property tax hike in the dark, leaving them mostly to learn what’s happening from the media. The mayor’s strategy appears to be to try to find 26 City Council members willing to vote for revenue-raising alternatives like higher trash-pickup fees in order to balance the budget without requiring any concessions like furlough days from labor unions representing city workers, which Johnson has said he will not seek or support. We think this tack is a mistake, whether it succeeds or not in producing a budget this year. We’re likely to be facing a yawning deficit this time next year as well, and the need to right-size a city government that grew explosively while it had well over $1 billion in federal pandemic assistance at its disposal will be even more urgent. The mayor needs to be much more open to views outside his echo chamber. One of the lessons Johnson and his fellow progressives on the City Council should have learned from the just-concluded election is that Chicago isn’t the hard-left city that Johnson’s narrow win in 2023 might have suggested. Johnson would help himself politically, and do the right thing by the city, if he brought aldermen he views as enemies into the room, too. And he could actually buttress the dubious moniker he bestowed on himself the other day in attempting to spin the flameout of his property tax hike — “collaborator-in-chief.” We spoke with three of the aldermen who told us they’ve been left out of the mayoral discussions to date — Ray Lopez, 15th, Marty Quinn, 13th, and Anthony Beale, 9th. They didn’t sound to us like politicians bent on some ideological mission. Their observations and suggestions were utterly practical, if tough-minded. First, no one should be surprised if it’s just before Christmas when the budget is finalized. The point of the vote to kill the property tax so soon after Johnson proposed it was to give the council time to plug the deficit in other ways. Now there’s time, albeit not as much as there should have been had Johnson not delayed his dead-on-arrival budget by two weeks. Second, no one should be surprised if Johnson’s gambit to pass a budget free of belt-tightening by negotiating with just a slice of the City Council falls short as well. As Lopez, Quinn and Beale told us, hiking the garbage-collection fee will be no more popular than the property tax increase. Finding majority support on the council for $300 million worth of cat-and-dog revenue raisers seems unlikely. We think the three are correct when they say that Chicagoans must be convinced Johnson and the council have looked in detail at all city government spending to determine what the city needs versus what it wants. So far, of course, that hasn’t happened, regardless of what Johnson administration officials say about the steps they’ve taken to date. In the next month-plus, if Johnson truly is serious about “collaboration,” the council and the mayor’s office must pore through each city department and eliminate spending that isn’t a critical service. There should be no sacred cows allowed in that room. Then and only then should Johnson and the council turn to revenue. And if they’ve taken their budget task seriously, the additional amount needed from households and businesses to finance city government will be far, far lower than $300 million. It might even be nothing at all. Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email [email protected].