Democratic candidates for Cook County Board president used their first televised debate to take swings at each other over President Donald Trump, tax fights and the decades-old Chicago parking meter deal.
Four-term incumbent President Toni Preckwinkle and challenger Ald. Brendan Reilly highlighted their differing approaches in the Tuesday night debate to the office that oversees the 17-member County Board, forest preserves, and budgets for the county’s massive health system, courts and jail.
Preckwinkle, a Hyde Park progressive who leads the county’s Democratic Party, repeatedly tried to steer the conversation to her efforts to fight back against Trump. Reilly, a business-backed, more conservative-leaning Democrat, hammered on problems with the county’s technology upgrade and Preckwinkle’s ties to Mayor Brandon Johnson.
The Fox 32 debate, moderated by Paris Schutz, devolved into testy exchanges and overlapping arguments as Reilly’s acerbic style pushed Preckwinkle off her typically measured script.
She attacked Reilly for having a “long-standing relationship with” Trump, and ripped the alderman for what she said was his failure to call out the president’s targeting of Democratic strongholds and his federal funding reductions for health care, child care and food stamps.
By the end of the debate, Preckwinkle’s criticism prompted Reilly to pull a photo from a folder showing him standing onstage in October behind Gov. JB Pritzker while the governor excoriated Trump’s ICE operation as evidence of his opposition to the federal incursion. “I’ll stand up to Donald Trump at least as effectively as Toni,” Reilly said.
Reilly was silent when she, the mayor and governor fought Trump’s efforts to cut funding over local sanctuary policies, Preckwinkle said. When immigration agents were “snatching people, kidnapping people without due process, sending them to detention centers around the country, and in foreign gulags, he didn’t say anything either,” she said.
Preckwinkle said he also tried to weaken the city’s sanctuary protections, a reference to a failed 2025 ordinance Reilly supported that he said would have allowed Chicago police to cooperate with immigration authorities to arrest accused “murderers, rapists, gang bangers, child sex offenders.”
“I’m not sure why my opponent wants to see these people walking around our streets,” Reilly said.
If the ordinance passed, Operation Midway Blitz might not have included such aggressive sweeps, he said. Reilly has said he wants to abolish “Trump’s ICE,” and revert it back to the way it operated a decade ago.
Preckwinkle said she wants to “eliminate ICE and start over,” and said those accused but not convicted of violent crimes deserve constitutional protections regardless of immigration status.
Reilly has taken a more tough-on-crime tack than Preckwinkle, including elevating the case of a woman critically injured when she was lit on fire on the CTA Blue Line. The accused attacker was on electronic monitoring at the time, Reilly noted, signaling the need for reforms.
The attack was a “horrific, terrible tragedy” and she supports planned tweaks to electronic monitoring under new Chief Judge Charles Beach, Preckwinkle said. But leaders shouldn’t backpedal on criminal justice reforms. Murders are down 50% over the last four years across the county, and in areas where local government funded violence prevention and reduction, shootings are down 60%, she said.
Accusations of a long relationship with Trump are “bogus,” Reilly said. He said he paid forward a 2010 donation from the then-hotelier to the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and Planned Parenthood of Illinois.
Reilly repeatedly turned the debate back to the costly contract to upgrade the county’s property tax technology.
“Eleven years later, it still doesn’t work and there are real consequences for this,” he said, referring to an estimated $122 million in lost investment and borrowing costs borne by school and library districts because of late bills and distributions.
Earlier Tuesday, Preckwinkle announced tax bills and revenues would arrive on time this spring. At the debate, she defended the upgrade as a complex and urgent one past leaders refused to tackle. Their contractor, Tyler Technologies, was the only firm that all of the separately elected property tax officials agreed could do the job, she said, after both an open bidding process and a reevaluation after the company blew several deadlines. Tyler has defended its work throughout.
“We will now have a property tax system that is transparent and timely,” she said. There are still dozens of outstanding upgrades, however, and Tyler’s contract is likely to be extended in the coming weeks.
Reilly pledged a full review of the contract if he ultimately wins, expressing skepticism about a smooth spring bill rollout and predicting school districts would hike property taxes to cover their losses.
Reilly also repeatedly blamed Preckwinkle for the political rise of Mayor Johnson, kicking off another heated back-and-forth about city and county finances. Preckwinkle noted Reilly supported this year’s city budget, which included roughly half a billion dollars in tax or fee hikes.
“It was (Johnson’s) failure in leadership that required us to pull together and pass an imperfect budget,” Reilly said.
Preckwinkle declined to endorse Johnson for another mayoral term. “I’m focused on the County Board race,” and Reilly should be too, she said.
While Preckwinkle has improved the county’s bond ratings, pension funding and reserves without fine or fee hikes in recent years, Reilly sought to remind voters of the major exceptions. Preckwinkle pushed through a sales tax hike in 2015 as a pension and infrastructure funding fix and backed the 2017 sweetened beverage tax, which was quickly overturned after a constituent revolt.
When Preckwinkle countered that the county hadn’t raised property taxes in 15 year, Reilly interjected, “Tie. Breaking. Vote. To Raise. The Soda Tax.”
The two even argued about the 2008 parking meter deal, one of the city’s biggest financial blunders. Preckwinkle, then 4th Ward alderman, was one of just five council members to vote against it. Reilly said he was “hoodwinked” into a yes vote by former Mayor Richard M. Daley’s team.
“Unlike you, Toni, I can actually admit when I made a mistake,” he said.
Preckwinkle said she’d warned the city should have raised parking rates on its own. “It was a bad idea no matter what.”
