Chicago's Mayor Makes Budget Moves, But Will It Be Enough?

Chicago's Mayor Brandon Johnson is trying to make his $16. 6 billion budget work by making some changes. He's facing a lot of pushback, though, and it's not clear if these changes will be enough to get the support he needs from the City Council. One of the big changes is about a tax on businesses. Originally, Mayor Johnson wanted to charge a $21 per-employee tax on companies with 100 or more workers. Now, he's only proposing this tax for businesses with 200 or more employees. This change would mean $18 million less in revenue, but he plans to make up for it by raising other taxes. For example, the tax on cloud computing and software would go up from 14% to 15%. This might not sound like a lot, but it's a big jump from last year's 9%. The mayor thinks this could bring in about $416 million. Towing fees are also going up. For smaller vehicles, the fee would go from $150 to $250. For bigger vehicles, it would go from $250 to $350. These changes could bring in an extra $7 million each year. The extra money from these changes would go towards pensions. The mayor wants to put more into the pension fund than is required. He's also promising to put in even more if the cloud computing tax brings in more money than expected. There are other changes too. The mayor is making changes to a proposed ride-sharing fee to make it less of a burden on working people. Non-profits would be exempt from a proposed boat mooring fee hike. The mayor is also reversing a proposed cut to the Chicago Public Library system's collections budget and fully funding gender-based violence services. But even with all these changes, it's still not clear if the mayor has enough support. A group of African-American alderpersons are against the head tax. They're worried about how it will affect restaurants in their wards. The mayor's team looked into exempting restaurants from the tax, but they say it would be illegal. Some alderpersons are suggesting other ways to raise money. Like restoring an automatic property tax increase tied to inflation or doubling a garbage collection fee that hasn't gone up since 2015. They're worried that the head tax might not be the best solution. They want to make sure they're not making it harder for people to live or for businesses to hire.