Brad Johnson wants a new head tax on all corps? Did it pass?

snitzoid
15 hours ago
6 min read

Thank goodness the counsel has more brains. Since 2020 the city's budget has increased by a whopping 40%. Wonder why the Mayor is desperate to increases taxes. How about reduce spending to pre Covid levels?

We are so f-cked!

Mayor Brandon Johnson’s head tax plan defeated in council committee vote

November 17, 2025

Aldermen voted down Mayor Brandon Johnson’s 2026 budget in a Monday committee, a remarkably rebellious display against the freshman mayor who has been struggling to shore up support for his controversial head tax.

But to hear Johnson tell it, the fight over the per-employee tax on Chicago’s bigger companies is far from over.

After the rancorous Finance Committee meeting adjourned, he challenged aldermen to come up with a better spending plan, but promised to veto any budget that includes a property tax increase, a grocery tax or a garbage fee hike. That means the City Council would need 34 out of 50 votes to override him.

“Working-class Chicagoans can simply just not afford a property tax increase,” the mayor told reporters. “Let me be clear: There are not any magic third options in cuts to core services and layoffs and revenue. Anyone who wants to pretend otherwise is being disingenuous.”

And even after its defeat Monday, Johnson doubled down on his backing of the head tax as a way to make corporations pay their fair share, setting up a difficult stretch run as he and aldermen try to find common ground on a balanced budget before the end of the year. “The corporate tax is in this budget. It will stay in this budget. Is that clear enough?” he said.

Johnson’s defiance came after he got outmaneuvered in the Finance Committee meeting.

His handpicked Finance chair, Ald. Pat Dowell, tried to dodge a vote on the head tax by recessing the meeting instead of considering the revenue ordinance for the mayor’s $16.6 billion budget, a sign Johnson expected to lose after Dowell publicly warned a Monday vote would be “premature.”

Mayoral foes Aldermen Raymond Lopez and Anthony Beale tabled her recess motion on a 24-7 roll call. Johnson’s budget chair, Ald. Jason Ervin, then attempted to delay a vote on the head tax, only to see that move fail by a single vote in an 18-18 tie.

Finally forced to consider the ordinance, the committee struck it down 25-10, a stunning rebuke of the chief executive who has overseen more losses in City Council than his predecessors.

How aldermen navigate the waters after Monday’s defiance could chart a new course in City Hall’s power dynamics and prove consequential to Chicago’s long-standing fiscal woes, but their stance against the mayor sends the process for a second straight year toward a critical end-of-year deadline.

Johnson brushed off talk that his Monday defeat was politically significant. “If you’re asking me if I’m afraid of a no, then you don’t know me very well,” he said. “I’m not afraid of a no.”

Still, his budget path won’t get any easier. Aldermen who now smell blood in the water will be less likely to follow his lead, though Johnson is trying to put the onus on them to come up with an alternative from among an unpopular set of options.

The mayor clearly would have rather not seen his head tax go down in Finance.

Earlier Monday afternoon, top Johnson adviser Jason Lee clutched a paper with what appeared to be his vote predictions as he approached on-the-fence aldermen during a presentation from the mayor’s budget and finance teams. A few moments later, Lopez interjected to accuse Lee of improperly lobbying on the City Council floor. Lee quickly left the room, but turned back to aldermen and blew a two-handed kiss.

The council must finalize the 2026 budget by the end of this year. Last year, the mayor took that timeline to the latest it’s been pushed in decades but ultimately clinched 27 votes by mid-December.

Johnson first pitched the head tax, which his team projected to raise $100 million, when he unveiled his plan to close a $1.19 billion budget gap for next year in an his October address to City Council. He framed the proposal as the city’s best chance to stand up to President Donald Trump and tax the rich but has faced hurdles in getting an aldermanic majority on board.

Last week, Johnson’s team started floating a modified version that would up the minimum company size from 100 to 200 employees. The $100 million revenue estimate went down to $82 million, with the gap then being filled by bumping up the personal property lease tax to 15%.

Dowell then told reporters she opposed the head tax in any form, and the mayor’s team floated another version this weekend where the levy would again apply to companies with 100 or more employees, but the $18 million that would be restored from that tweak would mainly go toward eligible businesses in South and West side wards, among other categories of spending.

Johnson’s third budget cycle was expected to be his most difficult yet given the city’s long-standing fiscal issues and the limited options he had to pull new levers for revenue.

His road to 26 out of 50 votes — or 25, if he’s willing to cast a tie-breaker — has proven difficult for Johnson given that his most ideologically aligned bloc — the Progressive Caucus — is not sizable enough to get over that hump, and not all of those aldermen are won over by his proposal. Thus, the mayor will need the Black Caucus on board, but some of those members are also hesitant on the head tax.

Dowell, who has been caught between her role on the mayor’s leadership team and her unequivocal disapproval of that major revenue component, sided with her colleagues against her own motion to recess.

Johnson’s stark red line against a property tax hike or grocery tax reinstatement for 2026 comes after he tried and failed to raise property taxes in the 2025 budget, and could not win over a council majority for the grocery tax earlier this year. Asked Monday what has changed to make him now steadfastly against raising those taxes, Johnson pointed to moves by Trump he said have left working-class Chicagoans in dire financial straits and unable to bear those additional burdens on their pocketbooks.

The debate roils at the same time the latest round of Cook County property bills are hitting the city’s South and West sides the hardest while Loop values and bills have dropped. The dynamic has cemented some existing aldermanic opposition to Johnson’s head tax, fueling fears it will further hurt businesses that would otherwise hire residents.

Meanwhile, his unsuccessful weekend push to quickly pass the budget clearly left an impact among some aldermen: frayed trust.

Ald. Timmy Knudsen said the mayor’s team spread “a complete lie” about him by telling other City Council members that the Lincoln Park alderman supported a head tax. “I have been a ‘heck no’ the whole time,” he added.

Knudsen, 43rd, called the move a “grasping at straws” effort to “get a few cheap votes.”

“This body does not trust them, and things like this are pretty direct evidence as to why,” he said.

Johnson on Monday told reporters it was Knudsen who was lying: “He said that? That’s not true.”

At times during the tense Finance Committee meeting, mayoral allies argued his opponents were lining up with Trump to support corporations at the expense of the working class.

Progressive Ald. Anthony Quezada posed a volley of rhetorical questions, asking how much some of America’s wealthiest corporations made in profits.

“We need to stop playing games and we need to stop just trying to make the mayor look bad, and actually work on passing policies that are sound,” he said.

Dowell fired back: “I don’t take kindly to the ‘stop playing games’ thing when none of us are down here playing games. We are here doing the work of our constituents. We are not monolithic.”

Moments later, Ervin trotted out a favorite line he uses when aldermen are caught between unsavory financial choices, noting that “Everybody wants to get to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”

Ald. Andre Vasquez, a critical swing vote who heads the Progressive Caucus, rose from his seat, spread his arms and looked toward the ceiling as Ervin spoke.

But the prayers weren’t enough for the mayor, as aldermen regardless lined up against the revenue ordinance.

Vasquez, who voted against the revenue package, noted City Hall has few options to land the budget — and worried there was no one who could bridge the mayor-aldermen divide.

“I don’t believe that any option has been fully taken off the table,” he said. “We still have to solve a math problem.”