Mayor Johnson to unveil 2027 budget plan

Back here at home in Chicago, about an hour, in just about an hour, Mayor Brandon Johnson is going to unveil his plan to help the city climb out of a more than $800 million budget deficit. Obviously, we're all focused on taxes. Are our taxes going up? Saquon is live at City Hall. Maybe she has the answer, or maybe we have to wait. Hi Saquon, Hey, Natalie. I mean, it seems like we're going to have to wait, but it's no secret that these aldermen have previously rejected proposals similar to this in previous budget cycles. And we'll get into all of that here in just a little bit. But for these alders, they're not really looking at their typical agenda, which would be usually packed with a lot of different items. But today, I mean, really, the whole focus of this special meeting is to really understand how the mayor plans to climb out of that nearly $1 billion deficit. Look, the mayor's office actually just put out a recent report that it says shows the priorities of almost 600 residents who participated in a budget engagement survey. It shows 88% of participants want taxes on large corporations to help close an $882 million deficit. This corporate head tax proposal has faced a lot of pushback from Alders in previous budget cycles. And Natalie, that's expected to be the case once again today. All the mayor's done here is repackaged it, rename it. This is a head tax. This is a tax on jobs. this is a tax on economic growth. What we should be doing is encouraging businesses to relocate here, encouraging existing businesses to expand. And what we're going to see if this head tax would ever move forward is business fleeing the city of Chicago. We have several suburbs that border us that would love, absolutely love, to take small, medium, and large businesses from the city of Chicago, which would be devastating to our economy. Well, right now, a group of 29 aldermen, including Alderman O'Shea, who you just heard from, are demanding government efficiencies first. And they've been very vocal about their stance against any sort of property tax increases or corporate head taxes. The mayor's office has responded by calling on those aldermen to then bring concrete solutions to the table rather than just a list of what they oppose. Now with that December deadline slowly approaching here, we know today definitely marks the start of what's expected to be a contentious budget battle here at City Hall. And, you know, we got two months of this. So we know that the special council meeting is going to be happening at 10 o'clock this morning. We know our political reporter, Brandon Pope, will be inside tracking the very latest. Natalie. Thank you, Saquon, for breaking that down for us.