CHICAGO CITY HALL (WBBM Newsradio) -- Chicago aldermen gave final approval Friday afternoon to a key part of an alternate budget plan for next year that has not been endorsed by Mayor Brandon Johnson.
The City Council voted 29-19 in favor of the revenue ordinance sponsored by aldermen united by concern about Mayor Johnson's proposed per-worker "head tax" on Chicago's largest employers.
"This is what leadership looks like," said Bridgeport alderwoman Nicole Lee (11th Ward) after the vote, praising the coalition of moderate and conservative aldermen who shephereded the alternate proposal toward final passage.
It uses a number of revenue sources to replace that head tax, including a plan to sell off more than a billion dollars in debt from unpaid parking and red-light camera tickets.
During committee debate this week, Downtown alderman Brendan Reilly said big companies and other government agencies have a lot of that unpaid ticket debt.
"There are fleets of vehicles that owe us lots of money," said Ald. Reilly (42nd Ward). "There are delivery services that owe us lots of money. These are corporations. Multinational multi-billion-dollar companies that are scofflaws to the city of Chicago continue to operate here every day ... while we have hundreds of millions of dollars in uncollected debt."
But Mayor Johnson told reporters at City Hall on Thursday that based on what's in the alternate budget, those debt collection activities would target poor and working-class Chicagoans.
"I believe that's morally bankrupt," the mayor said, drawing on his experience as a teacher to describe the alternate budget's revenue plan.
"When they don't do their homework and they don't study, they just start to fabricate ideas," he said, adding that his team is "at the table."
Earlier in the City Council meeting, an attempt by Mayor Johnson to introduce a new version of his controversial head tax - which in this iteration would collect $33 per worker per month from every company in the city with more than 500 employees - was thwarted when the proposal was sent to the Rules Committee. That's a parliamentary move often used by aldermen to delay consideration of measures they don't support.
Friday afternoon's vote on the revenue ordinance is five votes short of the 34 needed to override a potential veto from Mayor Johnson. A vote on the second part of the alternate budget is set for Saturday and is expected to pass.
Afterward, the mayor told reporters that aldermen still had time to consider his updated budget plan, even as the city faces a potential government shutdown if a budget is not approved by December 30th, but he reiterated he had not decided whether to veto the alternate proposal.