Every year, Chicago taxpayers hear the same thing: Pension costs are rising, state and federal aid has dried up, and there is a new round of “progressive revenues.” Although the words sound well-intentioned, the reality is that there is little real structural change from year to year, and the proposed “progressive revenues” often fall hardest on working families.
Convened by Mayor Brandon Johnson, the Chicago Financial Future Task Force wrote, “When a budget has a structural imbalance, it persistently has more expenses than revenues, even when the economy is strong.”
Responding to the report, the Civic Federation wrote, “Overall, the report contributes to and spurs critical conversations needed in the fall budget season, but does not provide long-term solutions to the City’s structural budget problems.”
Simply put, the operative word is structure.
To start, one must concede that Chicago’s structural budget deficits aren’t necessarily proof of mismanagement. Rather, they are historical faulty frameworks, that due to their design, will eventually implode. Therefore, City Hall needs to address its framework, rather than focusing on indexing specific taxes or limited personnel changes.
Look at the lives of Chicagoans. Leaders talk about taxing “luxury services,” but let’s be clear, residents in our 77 neighborhoods don’t care about whether a tax is “progressive” or “regressive.” They care that their haircuts, manicures, car washes and supermarket spending are within their budgets.
Other cities have faced similar fiscal challenges and have worked to address them head-on.
We cannot ask working families to pay more — under the banner of “progressivity”— until we show them that we’ve done everything possible to reform the structure of government. That means auditing city of Chicago departments, reducing redundancies, leveraging technology and negotiating fair but firm concessions with labor. We must prove efficiency before we demand additional sacrifice from the taxpayers.
Let’s think about our tax system with surgical precision. Our city’s decision makers need to do work on structure, not Band-Aids. First, do no harm to the taxpayer. Second, the cure cannot be worse than the malady. Our 77 neighborhoods and the working families who live in them deserve nothing less and must be allowed to live without further pain inflected by their governments.
George A. Cardenas, former City Council member and current Cook County Board of Review Commissioner, 1st District
Solar + storage = max power savings for Illinoisans
The Illinois Legislature has made smart investments in distributed renewable energy, like rooftop solar, creating jobs and lowering costs for families. Now, with federal policy doubling down on costly, polluting power plants, Illinois lawmakers have a better path forward.
This spring, lawmakers could have passed the Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act — a bill to supercharge battery storage across Illinois, deploy 6 gigawatts of storage by 2030 and launch a virtual power plant program that lets homes and businesses share their stored energy with the grid. Fossil-fuel interests blocked its passage.
The urgency hasn’t gone away. Illinois families are facing rising energy bills — ComEd customers saw increases of over $10 a month this summer; Ameren bills went up as much as $46. These spikes are due to a lack of power supply. When demand peaks, the grid turns to the most expensive, dirtiest sources — and households pay the price.
Battery storage is the fastest, most affordable fix. Unlike gas or coal plants, batteries are quick and cheap to deploy. They store excess energy when it’s cheap and release it when it’s needed most, lowering costs for everyone.
The Illinois Power Agency projects storage could save Ameren households up to $20.54 a month and ComEd households up to $8.52 a month by 2035. If Illinois had 7 gigawatts of storage last summer, price spikes could have dropped by 80%. Storage is not a burden — it’s a shield against high prices.
Consumers would pay nothing upfront. Once built, savings would outweigh costs as the Illinois Power Agency found the investment would pay for itself two to four times over.
Storage also boosts reliability. Virtual power plants connect household solar, batteries and smart devices into networks that keep neighborhoods powered when the grid fails. For low-income families, the bill would have created incentives to access solar-plus-storage and earn income from sharing their energy.
Other states — including Colorado, Maryland and Massachusetts — are moving ahead. Illinois risks falling behind.
Luckily, lawmakers return for a fall veto session, and Gov. JB Pritzker could call a special session. Advocates, consumer groups, and industry agree: A solar-plus-storage system is the most cost-effective way to cut bills, stabilize the grid and keep Illinois competitive.
Illinois has the tools. Now lawmakers must act — pass energy storage legislation, pair it with solar and protect families.
Shannon Anderson, virtual power plant policy director, Solar United Neighbors
A reminder to Americans
I took a walk around the park with my dad today and he told me (translated), “We were undocumented once too, and if it wasn’t for the unexpected Reagan Bill (Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986), we would probably still be undocumented right now, and not all of our family and many other families were able to apply for whatever reasons. With a flip of a political coin, that family today could have been us. Never forget that.”
The first- and second-generation Americans need to all bring the same type of energy to advocate for their parents as they do for concerts and festivals.
Alonso Zaragoza, Belmont Cragin
Cheers for Malort mention
I laughed out loud when Ms. Natalie Moore wrote in her latest column, “The City of Big Shoulders really isn’t to be trifled with. People drink nasty Malort for sport …”
Jim McCarthy, Wilmette