Chicago’s once-docile City Council has flexed its seldom-used muscle in many ways during the first half of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s four-year term, but not enough to satisfy one of the mayor’s most outspoken critics when it comes to City Hall’s mountain of debt.
Southwest Side Ald. Marty Quinn (13th) wants to raise the threshold for approving city borrowing from a simple majority, or 26 votes, to a two-thirds majority, or 34 votes. That would allow 17 members to block future borrowing.
“This administration wants to take on more and more debt and strap future generations of Chicagoans with the bill,” said Quinn, who has been at odds with Johnson over demands for a new Southwest Side police station and a measure to legalize accessory dwelling units known as granny flats “by right” instead of special use.
“The City Council has been a rubber stamp for decades. This is the time for the City Council to take more power. Be more co-equal. Force the mayor to interact with the entire City Council,” Quinn added. “It’s an opportunity to take a big step for independence. That’s my motivation. The end result will be the mayor will have to work with the City Council more than he does now.”
Quinn claims to have 19 “soft” votes in the Finance Committee and “23 or 24 soft” votes in the full City Council.
He’s hoping to reach the 26 votes needed for passage by capitalizing on Johnson’s political weakness in public opinion polls, some of which show the mayor in single digits.
He argued that colleagues who oppose the higher borrowing threshold will be hard-pressed to “justify that vote with a very unpopular mayor who has struggled with city finances and has proven he has no agenda in Springfield.”
Senior mayoral adviser Jason Lee argued that allowing “a potential 17-member coalition to block “bond ordinances for critical infrastructure for whatever reason” would only “lead to gridlock and potentially harmful delays on critical investments that the city needs to make to preserve” roads, bridges and other aging infrastructure.
“Who knows what interests a superminority might have, what political interests they might have at any given time to bring the city to a halt? You don’t want to create an opportunity for a superminority to play politics with critical infrastructure that keeps the city going,” he said.
Lee pointed to the two-thirds threshold already required for borrowing at the partially elected Chicago Board of Education.
“We’ve already seen in different spheres how problematic requiring a supermajority vote for budget items can be. I don’t see what value this would have, what problem this would even be solving,” Lee said. “Ald. Quinn has been in office for a long time. These bond issues have been pretty noncontroversial. To suggest that there needs to be a two-third majority to pass them just doesn’t make any sense to me.”
Downtown Ald. Bill Conway (34th) was among those who came close to blocking an $830 million general obligation bond issue that included a back-loaded repayment schedule that raised the overall price tag to $2 billion.
Johnson’s 26-23 victory was secured only after the mayor had to cast the third tiebreaking vote of his tenure — by breaking the 25-25 tie to kill 42nd Ward Ald. Brendan Reilly’s attempt to postpone the vote.
It was yet another nail-biter for a mayor whose tenuous relations with the City Council has already forced him to settle for his second choice as Zoning Committee chair. He also had to endure a marathon budget stalemate that saw alderpersons shoot down his proposed $300 million property tax increase by a humiliating 50-0 vote and reject a property tax increase of any size.
Conway strongly supports the higher threshold.
“We’ve made some reckless decisions on bond issuances with very slim support,” he said. “I’m very concerned about the fiscal future of Chicago, and therefore we need to be responsibly vigilant as a City Council as we look at these issuances.”
Conway agreed that a higher threshold would “hamstring the mayor.” But he thinks that’s a good thing, considering controversies surrounding the $830 million bond issue, the mayor’s $1.25 billion bond issue for housing and economic development, and Johnson’s decision to use $135 million of that money to let a city-owned nonprofit developer issue loans to developers who build affordable housing and sell their environmentally friendly buildings back to the city.
Civic Federation President Joe Ferguson said a two-thirds requirement “has some strengths and weaknesses.”
“What we don’t want to do is make it nearly impossible for the city to be approving and issuing critically necessary bonds,” Ferguson said. “At the same time, it may create a little bit more of an impetus for better understanding and broader base of support on what, at times, have come to be controversial issues.”