Chicago needs a mayor who is willing to “risk the job to save the city,” U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley said Thursday, portraying himself as the only candidate in the crowded field willing to “risk it all.”
Quigley’s decision to run for mayor and re-election to Congress simultaneously looks more like playing it safe than risking it all. But the 17-year veteran North Side congressman claims the opposite is true.
If elected mayor, Quigley said it would be his last stop in politics. He would never seek another elected office.
“The next mayor has to be willing to risk the job to save the city… You have to be willing to say, `This is going to be my last job.’ You have to be willing to risk it all, because we’re out of runway,” Quigley told the Sun-Times. “This is my last and biggest fight. I have nothing to lose. I’m only in this race for Chicago.”
Quigley said his laser focus on government — not politics — will give him freedom to make the politically unpopular decisions required to solve the city’s enormous financial problems.
Chicago has a $90 million mid-year budget shortfall, a $1 billion gap in next year’s budget and a $36 billion pension crisis that will be made $11 billion worse by the police and fire pension sweetener signed by Gov. JB Pritzker. Police, Fire and Municipal Employees pension funds are hovering dangerously close to insolvency. The city’s bond rating is just one level above junk status.
Quigley acknowledged that the pension protection clause in the Illinois Constitution includes an ironclad guarantee that existing benefits “shall not be diminished or impaired.”
But there’s nothing stopping the next mayor from asking union leaders to voluntarily make some of the changes needed to save their pensions.
Quigley promised to do just that.
“What the mayor has to do… is to say to our union partners, `We’re not gonna take away your pension, but it will fail,’” Quigley said.
“You call the unions in and tell them,`I want you to come to this meeting and I want the word `yes’ in your vocabulary… If we don’t make some honest trade-offs” — including “how much people pay in, when they start collecting” — then a “slight blip in the economy” could jeopardize their retirement checks altogether.
“We can meet in rooms and talk about this and negotiate and make it as fair and equitable as we can or, at some point, a federal judge will make these decisions. And we have to remember the federal judge in Detroit said, `I have to treat [pension] debt like any other debt’” that must be paid, he said.
Quigley said he would confront the city’s budget crisis with the employee layoffs that incumbent Mayor Brandon Johnson has refused to consider for fear of alienating the unions that put him in office. He vowed to eliminate thousands of city jobs and restore the city payroll to pre-pandemic levels, “and then some.”
His tough-love message to unionized city employees extends to building trade unions that have helped Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias, the presumed frontrunner in the crowded race for mayor, amass a $22 million campaign war chest that triples the combined total of the other candidates.
Quigley promises to build 50,000 affordable housing units over four years and cut the cost of each unit by paying tradespeople a reduced “residential prevailing wage” for single family homes and smaller housing projects.
“Our goal is to provide affordable housing, which is critical for safety and generational wealth for people who have never had that,” Quigley said.
“Unions in 43 states, [including] progressive states like New York and California, have that residential rate. I think the unions would understand that.”
Johnson struggled to pass his first three budgets and has spent the last three and a half years fighting with a City Council more independent than it has ever been. Quigley says he would embrace that independence, in part by supporting a city charter that gives the City Council a greater role in decision-making.
“I want the next mayor to have less power because, if you go into it with the other attitude, you fall into the trap that the last couple mayors have had — and that is open, constant friction with the City Council,” Quigley said. “My attitude is, when an alder votes the other way, you should pat him [or her] on the back and say, `I hope you’re with me next time.’”