After Chicago’s City Council passed an historic budget on Dec. 20, Mayor Brandon Johnson announced he would not veto the budget, averting a city government shutdown, but he did issue two executive orders.
One order capped police overtime spending and the other overruled the sale of medical debt to private debt collection companies.
Alderman Marty Quinn (13th) thinks it will be difficult to enforce the cap on police overtime.
“It’s going to be very difficult for the mayor to rein in overtime and here’s why,” he said. “Chicago’s a world class city and we constantly have events going. There are certain alders who want to attack the police but these are the same alders who will never cancel a festival in their neighborhood that requires additional police presence.”
This New Year’s Eve into New Year’s Day, as the city celebrates, there will be a heavy police presence in the city for security purposes; police are canceling days off, he said.
“There’s a price tag associated with that,” Quinn said. “You can’t have it both ways and what you’re hearing out of the mayor’s office is just more hypocrisy. I think it’s a stretch more rooted in politics than policy.”
The executive order eliminating medical debt collection by private debt collection companies is also a concern for Quinn.
“The mayor’s trying to carve out who should pay debt and who shouldn’t,” he said. “That doesn’t go over well and is trying to get away from what the city currently does [to collect debt.]”
The city has hired law firms to collect various outstanding municipal debt, Quinn said.
“In his own budget proposal, the mayor earmarked $113 million for debt collection,” he said. “On top of that he’s talking about red light cameras. Again, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say I’m against debt collection and install red light cameras. There’s a pattern of the mayor saying something and doing another.”
The city sought to sell $3 billion in debt accrued over the past seven years to investors who were meant to collect it, a November story by the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
Three stories by Chicago City Wire from July and August confirmed at least three law firms are authorized to collect city debt on a contingency basis. The firms are Goldman & Grant, Heller, Frizzone & Pelizzari, Ltd. and Markoff Law.
“You take that in totality and it serves as the reason as to why the alders created their own budget as a historical step in the City of Chicago,” Quinn said. “Because at the end of the day, City of Chicago taxpayers do not trust the mayor.”
The mayor’s use of executive orders was interesting to Quinn.
“At the end of the day, it’s a math equation,” he said. “In the City of Chicago, if you have 26 votes you carry the day, so it’s very important that the coalition that voted for its own budget and wrestled the budget away from the mayor continues to stay together and push back on these ideas.”
A better deal is the result of a strong council, Quinn said.
Neither city municipal code nor Illinois statute prohibit a mayor from issuing executive orders as long as they do not contradict existing law or reallocate funding appropriations, according to a June 2023 Better Government Association story.
“We’re not talking about a $300 million property tax increase, a tax on groceries or garbage,” he said. “The council pushed back and for our neighborhood having that supplemental pension payment is huge for city workers who built their careers on a promise that a pension would be there.”
Because pension payments are statutorily obligated, the city’s overall fiscal health is better, Quinn added.
“Not thinking about the long-term also would have affected the city’s credit rating in the future,” he said.
There is no property tax increase for the year 2026.
On the question of coming property taxes post-2026, Quinn said the alternative budget coalition would like to see more of the Ernst & Young budget reforms to make government better as a goal.
“We’ll see future budget projections in August so we’ll have a better idea at that point,” he said. “I won’t be voting for a property tax increase next year.”
The mayor’s idea of getting financial assistance from the State of Illinois is not realistic, according to Quinn.
“He doesn’t even have a relationship with the governor,” he said. “How do you plan on getting new revenue from the state, which has a $50 billion budget, when you haven’t worked on any relationships? That’s a real problem for the City of Chicago when the mayor can’t get along with people.”
There were concerns around the mayor’s team directing the Ernst & Young auditing team to what it could audit, according to Quinn.
“When you hire a company to do an audit, you should not put guardrails on the front end of the audit,” he said. “Give them 100 percent access to everything and let them come up with everything. There could be more, for example.”
Quinn believes the Ernst & Young report is a public document and should be available to Chicago residents.
“We had to call for a special city council meeting to have that document made public and had Ernst & Young employees come and testify before the council,” Quinn said. “Think about that for a second. What don’t you want to come out?”
Hiring outside auditors says a lot about a city financial team and then allowing auditors to look only at specific budget issues in a $3.5 million report wastes taxpayer money, he noted.
“Maybe the whole idea was political in nature and something to lean on and not necessarily to use,” Quinn said.
In the end, the alderman is thankful for all the other alders who stood for their wards over all parts of the city.
“I’m grateful for that group to come together in less than a month, put together a work product and have honest conversations inside the group,” Quinn said. “To put forth a budget proposal that passes is really something to be proud of. It was a lot of good work by a lot of people that cared deeply about the City of Chicago.”