Renegade Chicago aldermen battling with Mayor Brandon Johnson over competing 2026 budgets announced tweaks to their proposal Monday, but withheld critical details as a negotiation meeting between the sides broke down.
The City Council majority group is dropping its plan to raise the garbage pick-up fee and will also maintain youth summer job funding at levels first proposed by Johnson after previously pushing for a smaller amount, its members told reporters Monday. The changes are an apparent bid to convince more colleagues to join them and blunt Johnson’s near-daily criticism that their package would hurt working-class Chicagoans.
Johnson on Monday initially claimed the change as a win pulling the opposed aldermen’s plan closer to his own and said he has “wiggle room” to negotiate.
“Hopefully this is a sign that, through our advocacy for working people, these members understand the importance of not passing budgets that disproportionately impact people already experiencing Trump cuts and struggling to make the ends meet,” he said during a City Hall news conference.
But that cautiously optimistic tone turned sour later in the day after Johnson met with the aldermen. The mayor said the alternative plan’s backers refused to share key details about how they would balance the budget while adding costs and cutting fees to the tune of over $40 million.
“They are literally keeping the people of the city of Chicago in the dark,” Johnson told reporters at City Hall after the meeting. “This is not only not transparent, it’s not a responsible way to approach this.”
Johnson said the meeting with aldermen lasted around half an hour. The two sides now generally agree on how the city’s money should be spent, but remain at odds over how it should be raised, he added.
“I just, never in my life have I ever seen the level and the degree of obstinance coming from a legislative branch,” he said.
The group had previously counted on their garbage fee hike to bring in $35 million and said their cuts to youth job spending would save $6.2 million, so they need new fees, taxes or cuts to replace that money in order to make the math work.
For their part, the alternative plan’s supporters said Monday evening that they decided to withhold those key details from Johnson — and the public — because they do not trust the mayor to negotiate in good faith.
“We are not going share the next 12, 16 hours having somebody in this administration poo-poo our numbers, say that our estimates are off, say that the revenue ideas that we have our unworkable,” Ald. Pat Dowell, Johnson’s handpicked Finance Committee chair, told reporters.
Downtown Ald. Brendan Reilly said the specifics of the plan would be revealed Tuesday during a Finance Committee meeting. He promised the plan would “stand up to the sunshine” and said the group’s estimates challenged by Johnson’s team have been vetted by aldermen, civic groups and members of past mayoral administrations.
A committee vote is expected during the meeting, Reilly said. The group claims to have a City Council majority, and a committee win would tee up the budget for passage as early as Wednesday.
“Why wouldn’t we want to demonstrate our strength,” Reilly said after the news conference.
Johnson had pledged to veto a budget with a garbage fee increase. He did not respond directly earlier Monday when asked whether he would veto the alternate budget now that such an increase has been removed.
The mayor’s budget opponents said they similarly asked if he would veto their spending plan if it did not include his proposed head tax on businesses with over 500 employees, but “did not get a straight answer,” Ald. Nicole Lee said.
Across the City Council aisle, Johnson’s aldermanic supporters argued Monday the half-revealed plan alternative offered little to analyze.
“We’ve seen nothing,” said Ald. Jason Ervin, the council’s Budget Committee chair and a close Johnson ally. “The devil is in the details in all of these things. We need to know and understand how this budget is balanced.”
For his part, Johnson also referred to “some exaggerated projections” from opponents. He noted “serious concerns about some of the fine print of their ideas” and said the alternative plan would increase the city’s budget gap by around $250 million next year.
Budget Director Annette Guzman argued the alternative plan — which relies on rosy estimates on how much money the city would earn from legalizing video gambling machines and makes more optimistic assumptions on tax income than the mayor’s plan — is unbalanced.
“We have no idea what they’re basing their numbers on. They have not shown us any data,” Guzman said.
According to the latest monthly revenue report, city revenue collections have outperformed expectations set in the 2025 budget by $143.7 million through October this year amid high hauls from utility taxes and transaction taxes.
The clock is ticking: Johnson and the City Council must pass a budget by the end of the year to avoid breaking state law and suffering murky, but surely destructive consequences.
And with just two holiday-filled weeks to get the job done, Johnson remains far from a majority of the 50-member council supporting his budget, while the backers of the aldermen’s competing budget similarly do not appear to have the supermajority of at least 34 votes they would need to overcome a possible mayoral veto.
Johnson said Monday he won’t let the deadline pass.
“I am not going to allow for our government to be shut down. It is reckless, and quite frankly, it only hurts working people, so I’m going to do everything in my power to avoid doing that.”
Backers of the alternative budget led a charge last week to fill the City Council’s schedule with four meetings in four days, a move they said was needed to speed up negotiations. But around 30 members of the same group did not show up for the first such meeting Monday, a clearly coordinated decision that prevented a quorum needed to start the meeting.
During an impromptu news conference after the meeting failed to commence, progressives and other Johnson allies who attended said they received no notice from their competing colleagues.
“People have been working all through the weekend, but I think just to decency and respect, you call the meeting, you show up for the meeting,” Ervin said. “I’m disappointed that our colleagues have not decided to show up today to do the business of the people.”
Ervin and the other supporters of Johnson’s budget had little to say about the tweaked counterproposal.
Pressed on if changes will come to Johnson’s own 2026 package, which has already been decisively voted down in the Finance Committee and opposed in two petitions by City Council majorities, Ervin said he was open to proposed changes and waiting on others “to put something on the table that makes sense.”
“In life, I’ve determined that I’m not going to bargain against myself,” he said.
The largest sticking point for aldermen opposed to Johnson’s proposal remains his plan to reinstate a head tax at $33 a month for every worker at companies with over 500 Chicago employees, a move Johnson heralds as a much-needed effort to tax the rich in lieu of working Chicagoans, but one derided by opponents as a job killer. Some progressive aldermen who do not oppose the head tax have also said they oppose Johnson’s plans to borrow money to pay for police settlements and firefighter backpay, as well as his plan to cut short a previously planned advanced pension payment.
The tweaked counterproposal announced Monday also includes a full restoration of the Chicago Public Library collections budget, as well as unspecified “additional funding” for gender-based violence programs, Ald. Gilbert Villegas wrote in a morning statement.
The proposal’s biggest change, cutting plans to double garbage fees, could win over aldermen who complained that hike would hit working-class Chicagoans too hard.
Villegas wrote the plan now “represents the position of an even broader number of alders than we had just a few days ago.” He did not specify how many aldermen support the plan or who had been convinced to support it.
His statement referred to the changed plan as a “final proposal.”
