Chicago’s budget fight is back in the headlines after Mayor Brandon Johnson unveiled his latest patch for the city’s shortfall this week, drawing fresh criticism from the so-called corporate caucus on the City Council over his reliance on gambling and cannabis revenue, refinanced bonds, and leftover COVID relief funds to close the gap. Mayor Johnson blamed council members who blocked his proposed corporate head tax for the roughly $130 million shortfall, while arguing that his other revenue streams have outperformed expectations enough to cover the difference.
Dan Proft was joined by George Cardenas, a former longtime Chicago alderman who now serves as a Cook County Board of Review Commissioner and is running for mayor in the February election, to dig into the budget standoff and the broader financial condition of the city.
Cardenas said he has little patience for the caucus warfare at City Hall, arguing that both sides are talking past each other instead of confronting the real issue: spending that has vastly outpaced inflation. He said an audit his team conducted of the city’s budget books from 2019 through 2026 found Chicago’s spending grew at roughly twice the rate of inflation over that stretch, guaranteeing a cycle of deficits and last-minute revenue scrambles unless the underlying cost structure changes.
Rather than focus on new taxes, Cardenas called for a full review of the city’s roughly $7 billion in outside contracts, arguing that a professional efficiency review could conservatively identify around a billion dollars in annual savings, or about sixteen percent, by scrutinizing spending on things like healthcare, facilities management and services that have never been properly tracked or measured. He pointed to prior consulting reports the city paid millions for and then shelved, suggesting the findings were buried because they threatened political allies benefiting from the current spending patterns.
Pressed on whether any city function should simply be eliminated, Cardenas said Chicago has no business running grocery stores, as Johnson has proposed, arguing the city cannot manage its day-to-day finances well enough to take on that kind of operation. He said core city services should be limited to public safety, garbage collection, pothole repair and basic governance, with everything else subject to review.
On housing, Cardenas pointed to his own policy proposal to shorten the city’s permitting cycle from ninety days to forty-five, with a goal of adding 22,000 housing units and bringing typical new-construction costs down from roughly $800,000 to the $400,000 range. He described Chicago’s high rents as fundamentally a supply problem that requires more building, paired with a more attractive regulatory and tax environment for developers.
Asked about property taxes, Cardenas said the assessment methodology used by the Board of Review and the Cook County Assessor’s office has historically been inconsistent, though he said the two offices have recently aligned on a shared approach that accounts for expenses, tax burdens and capitalization rates. He said he wants to keep working with the incoming assessor to ease the disproportionate tax pressure on homeowners in the city’s south and west side neighborhoods, and pointed to downtown vacancy, including on State Street, as a priority for redevelopment and new investment.
Cardenas also laid out his “parenting matters” proposal, which would direct public dollars now spent on violence-interruption programs toward direct payments to parents as an incentive to stay involved in their children’s lives, with income eligibility limits and measurable outcomes attached. He argued that stabilizing families on the front end would reduce the need for costly interventions later and described a dashboard his campaign has built to track public safety, transit reliability, infrastructure delivery and city services ward by ward, which he said he would use to hold department heads publicly accountable in weekly press conferences if elected.
Cardenas pointed listeners to his campaign website, cardenas4chicago.com, and its policy hub for the full detail on his spending, housing and public safety proposals.