A panel including Alds. Jessie Fuentes (26), Matt O'Shea (19), Samantha Nugent (39) and Jason Ervin (28) are pictured at a City Club luncheon on Nov. 19, 2025. [Livestream]

After an impasse over the 2026 city budget was laid bare this week, four members of the City Council appeared on a City Club of Chicago panel Wednesday to debate potential solutions to the city’s nearly $1.2 billion budget gap, with all of them seeming to agree that a property tax levy hike, even though not currently proposed, should be off the table.

However, Ald. Jason Ervin (28), who chairs the Committee on Budget and Government Operations and who said last week that he didn’t want to hit constituents with a levy hike on top of tax bill increases from the 2024 reassessment, said he remains concerned that Chicago has “consistently taken an elevator” rather than an “escalator” when it comes to keeping up with revenue. 

Ervin has been critical in the past of the decision to defer the city’s Consumer Price Index-related annual adjustment to the tax levy for multiple consecutive years. He said decisions like that, which he said also include the one-time fixes of selling off the city’s parking meters and Chicago Skyway, have contributed to the position the city now finds itself in. 

“Had we stayed on just a regular path of CPI-related increases just to keep pace with inflation, … our tax bills [would be] the same as they are today,” Ervin said. "However, we would still own the Chicago Skyway, we’d still own our parking meters, because we have made decisions at the moment to satisfy the need not to touch what many of us believe to be the third rail of politics, which is property tax increases.” 

The City Council finance committee voted this week not to advance the mayor’s revenue ordinance, with much of the opposition revolving around a $21-per-employee monthly tax on for-profit businesses with at least 100 Chicago-based workers, stalling the budget process and prolonging negotiations as many council members ask for more cuts.  

But Mayor Brandon Johnson has vowed to veto any budget that uses regressive taxes on groceries and garbage collection or layoffs and service cuts to plug the hole rather than taxes on big businesses and the wealthy. The mayor has also vowed to veto any property tax hike. 

Related: Finance committee votes down revenue ordinance containing head tax, but mayor vows to continue push to tax the rich

While also opposing a property tax increase, Alds. Matt O’Shea (19) and Samantha Nugent (39) reiterated their desire to see the mayor’s team reexamine potential cuts and efficiencies in the Ernst and Young budget report that could be instituted as soon as next year. 

The mayor has said his budget proposal incorporated $80 million in expenditure reduction recommendations from the Ernst and Young report, but O’Shea said he thinks there’s another $20-30 million to be realized next year. 

Related: Alderpeople grill officials on Ernst and Young financial report, calling for mayor’s office to incorporate more cuts, savings into upcoming budget 

“Before I go back to the people in the 19th Ward and say, ‘You got to give some more. We're going to borrow some more. We're going to tax you some more. We're going to charge you some more fees,’ I need to be able to look them in the eye and say, I did everything I could to work with my colleagues to lessen the burden,” O’Shea said. 

Nugent said she’d rather explore additional savings opportunities instead of taxing businesses more, which she said has contributed to the imbalance in the property tax burden. 

“If we want our property tax bills to be lower, we need more businesses to come into Chicago and fill in the commercial real estate that's empty right now,” Nugent, the president pro tempore of the council, said. “I do believe, in my heart of all hearts, that there is money to be found in efficiencies.” 

O’Shea also said that the mayor and council should be willing to bring the city’s labor unions to the table to see if there’s any savings opportunities that could be found, such as wrap-around benefits that aren’t covered by collective bargaining agreements. 

“If you don't ask them, they're not going to volunteer,” O’Shea told reporters after the event. “If I was running a union, I wouldn't be volunteering unless asked, but that's what previous mayors have done when you were looking at dire financial situations.”  

Progressive Ald. Jessie Fuentes (26) spoke in support of the mayor’s plan on the panel, saying that filling a shortfall of this magnitude “requires shared sacrifice.”  

“I remember when 50 schools closed across our city, and so did mental health clinics. I remember the mass layoffs that we’d seen a little over seven years ago,” Fuentes said. “My fear is if we keep talking about efficiencies, we're talking about the cuts to services — that can possibly be youth employment, that can possibly be violence intervention, that can possibly be grant dollars to gender-based violence and community safety.”  

Fuentes also spoke against any property tax increase, arguing that she was most worried about budgets that push working class households out of Chicago. 

“The reality is that we have to figure out how do we build a city that allows everyone to live in it,” Fuentes said. “Every single year, not just due to the city … other levels of government can contribute to this, but we're starting to build the city that our families can no longer afford to live in.”