A new report commissioned by Mayor Brandon Johnson lays out a vast array of options with potential to save the city as much as $455.5 million and generate as much as $1.65 billion in new revenue.
Johnson gave the group chaired by influential businessman Jim Reynolds and Chicago Urban League President Karen Freeman-Wilson carte blanche to create a road map to erase Chicago’s $1.15 billion budget shortfall, and the 24-member group of civic leaders apparently took their marching orders seriously.
Chicago mayors have commissioned and received similar reports over the years — from the Civic Federation, the Chicago Federation of Labor, inspectors general and the City Council Office of Financial Analysis. Many of those reports have sat on shelves and gathered dust. Unsolicited and politically unpopular suggestions have been rejected and ridiculed by the mayor and City Council.
But the Reynolds report is, by far, the most sweeping in recent memory.
Revenue ideas run the gamut—from raising taxes on bottled water, liquor, plastic bags, and retail deliveries to restoring the $4-a-month employee head tax and automatic escalator locking in annual property tax increases at the rate of inflation. The report also calls for increasing a $9.50-a-month garbage collection fee that has been frozen since its 2015 inception.
Cost-cutting options are equally sweeping. They include flexible furlough days that Johnson has steadfastly avoided for fear of alienating the labor unions that helped put him in office, raising the employee health care contribution, disbanding the Chicago Police Department’s 25 horse, 22-employee Mounted Unit, and diverting some 911 calls for medical emergencies to area hospitals for possible tele-health services instead of an on-scene response.
The Chicago Financial Future Task Force even recommended imposing “treatment, no transport fees” for ambulance services that do not end with patients taken to hospitals, new or higher fees for false fire and burglar alarms and hazardous materials calls, and introducing a so-called “light duty position” in the Chicago Fire Department to reduce overtime and expedite a return to work for firefighters and paramedics on medical lay-up.
There’s even a suggestion to authorize “six autonomous aerial drones” at the Chicago Police Department to help with crime-fighting.
“I’ve been involved in public finance and fiscal issues with cities, particularly Chicago, for almost the last 30 years. But I’ve never looked at the budget and the data quite like this,” Reynolds told reporters during a virtual briefing this week.
“We looked at everything — from how many cars they have in the fleets to how much overtime they have in the Police Department to personnel they have, how much they pay and what can be streamlined and what we pay for garbage [collection] vs. what it costs for garbage… to what we charge for special events vs. what it actually costs us.”
Reynolds said it was a “bold move” for Johnson to “ask a group like us to do this, then make every single data point that we would need available to us with no reservations and no restrictions. We saw everything.”
Although the report recommends restoring former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s automatic escalator locking in annual property tax increase, Reynolds said property tax increases were not top of mind.
Johnson campaigned on a promise to hold the line on property taxes, only to recommend a $300 million increase that was unanimously shot down a year ago by an emboldened City Council that refused to raise property taxes by any amount.
“We took a much deeper dive than just saying, `Let’s raise property taxes.’ That wouldn’t have required much work at all and certainly wouldn’t have required a 24-person group meeting over 20 times going through voluminous pages of data to come up with ideas…In fact, that came up very little,” Reynolds said.
“A city controls everything in that city. The city owns so much and can convert so many things to revenue opportunities and has efficiency opportunities before they get to the point where they have to tax their citizens.”
Freeman-Wilson characterized the challenges Chicago faces as “significant and daunting.” That includes the $1.15 billion shortfall for 2026 with “fixed” pension and debt costs that gobble up 40% of the city’s corporate fund and “crowd out” essential services like public safety, sanitation, libraries and public transportation “that we all value as citizens.”
“These are not mandates. These are recommendations that are meant to inform city leaders as they make the final decisions relative to fiscal year 2026 budget,” she said. “What makes our task force significantly different from prior efforts is that we are independent by design and we understood that there has to be an approach where everyone takes a fair share.”
Ald. Pat Dowell (3rd), chair of the City Council’s Finance Committee, said the Reynolds report “can’t end up being the same as other reports” on city finances that sat on a shelf gathering dust.
“The situation the city finds itself in is more critical. Everything has to be open for discussion,” she said.
Budget Chair Jason Ervin (28th), who will preside over City Council hearings on the mayor’s spending plan, said he remains adamantly opposed to raising the garbage fee. He argued that trash collection “started as a municipal service and should have stayed a municipal service” provided to homeowners who pay property taxes at no additional cost.