With 2024 in the books and 2025 already here, gulp, our city and state find themselves in precarious places.
The city of Chicago ended the year with the extraordinarily messy passage of a $17.1 billion budget, featuring repeated City Council rejections of proposed mayoral property-tax hikes. The council battles coincided with the outrageous attempt by Mayor Brandon Johnson and his lame-duck school board to jam through an unaffordable contract with the Chicago Teachers Union, and the remarkable success of Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez to obtain a Christmas Eve court ruling staving off the Johnson/CTU power play, at least for now.
The state of Illinois returns to work this month facing a projected deficit of more than $3 billion for the coming fiscal year. Gov. JB Pritzker and state lawmakers will grapple with arguably the toughest budget conditions since Pritzker first took office in 2019.
We think Johnson and Pritzker ought to look at what’s behind and before them, take stock of the November election that featured Donald Trump’s surprisingly easy victory, and conclude that they need to change their approaches to governing in order to begin to put Chicago and Illinois back on the right track. In that spirit, we’re suggesting New Year’s resolutions for our governor and mayor, as well as some other parties who will play important roles in the coming year.