February 19, 2026
Published originally in Crain's Chicago Business on Thursday, February 19, 2026.
The maxim that “laws are like sausages, no one wants to see them being made” unquestionably applies to government budgets. But last year’s multi-month showdown over Chicago’s budget between the Mayor and the City Council was hard to watch, even by sausage-making standards. The City Council stepped up to a near-unprecedented level of engagement with the deeply flawed and fiscally irresponsible proposal introduced by the Johnson Administration. However, in opposing the Mayor, the Council was operating with one hand tied behind its back. The result was a final budget that was only a marginal improvement on the Mayor’s proposal, with both falling far short of what Chicago truly needs.
Why did this happen? Put simply, Chicago’s budget process is designed for a City Council that rubber-stamps the budget the Mayor introduces. Chicago’s legislative and executive branches should be coequal partners in the governing process, able to check and balance one another. But in reality, the City Council is at an extreme disadvantage when it seeks to check the Mayor.
If the Council chooses to acquiesce to the Mayor, as is the long prevailing customary practice, the existing system works just fine. But as soon as the Council breaks with the administration, the system falls apart —and that’s exactly what we saw last fall. The alders who defied the Mayor and passed their own alternative budget were structurally handcuffed from achieving more.
Council members who wish to conduct a truly independent and critical analysis of the Mayor’s proposed budget are handicapped from the jump in three key ways:
1. Timing. The Mayor presents a budget proposal in the middle of October, and the deadline for approval is the end of December. This leaves the Council with only two and a half months to analyze and interrogate the Mayor’s budget proposal, consult the public, debate alternatives, negotiate amongst themselves, and fashion and pass a final version. Those ten weeks look even shorter when you consider that they include the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. Chicago’s compressed budget timeline stands in stark contrast to other cities such as New York City, which gives its Council nearly five months to work with the Mayor’s budget proposal before its deadline. Council should fix this problem by setting an earlier deadline for the beginning of the budget process, moving up mid-year reports and hearings, restructuring the calendar to facilitate independent analysis of the budget proposal, and establishing a formal process for Council to respond to and negotiate with the Mayor. All of this would better situate alders for co-equal engagement throughout the budget cycle.
2. Staffing. Co-equal engagement between the Mayor and City Council can’t happen without professional, permanent staffing for both. On this score, the City Council is woefully under-resourced. Writing a budget is a highly complex and technical task that requires the input of experts in City finances. Currently, the financial experts from the City departments that handle budgeting and finance all report directly to the Mayor. In the most recent budget cycle, we frequently saw the City employees charged with designing the budget refuse to provide timely and neutral information in response to aldermanic requests. Since alders have limited capacities for independent fiscal analysis and budget expertise, they were all but forced to turn to outside advisors to craft their own alternative for 2026. To fix this before the 2027 budget cycle begins, alders should look to expand and professionalize existing capacity by upgrading the Council Office of Financial Analysis to an independent budget office. The Council should also professionalize the staff of the budget, finance, and other key committees involved in legislative and oversight matters, and ensure that those staff focus solely on supporting committee work.
3. Control of the Council Itself. As Chicago’s legislative branch, the City Council in theory ought to be independent from the executive branch. Yet Chicago’s structure departs sharply from this norm: the Mayor presides over the City Council. The Mayor sets the agendas for City Council meetings and appoints the chairs of the Council’s legislative committees. In other words, the Mayor controls the leadership structure of the committees that oversee him. This tips the balance of power into the Mayor’s hands and leaves the City Council without a clear, unified voice when policy conflicts arise between the two branches. To restore balance and strengthen its independence, the Council should select an internal leader, empowered to lead the Council’s appointment of its own committee chairs, rather than ceding that power to the Mayor.
The good news is that the Council itself has the power to immediately change important elements of this flawed system. The Council can pass ordinances and change its own rules to address the obstacles and constraints summarized above. It can upgrade committee hiring and staffing capacities, repurpose existing positions, and increase its budget for independent fiscal and budget analysis. Even easier, the Council can and should change its internal rules of order to mandate Council selection of its own leadership and committee chairs. Finally, they should legislate that the executive branch comply with Council requests for information and expert testimony. In the past, inertia has stopped the Council from making these changes. It was easiest for alders to allow the Mayor to pass his budget without conflict, so they could get on with the business of managing their individual wards. But this past year showed us that those days are over.
The City Council took an important first step toward independence last year. While the budget passed was far from perfect, Alders deserve credit for exercising authority that had long gone unused. Now they must institutionalize that authority, and in so doing, assert the City Council as a genuine partner to the Mayor, not a rubber stamp. This is especially important considering recent clashes over how the Mayor has implemented the Council-approved budget. These recent disputes over implementation are concerning in themselves, but have diverted attention from what should be the first-order priority: reform. This leaves the effort to fix our broken budget process already behind the curve for what will likely be even more daunting challenges before 2027.
City Council must act now. Until the budget process itself is fixed, Chicago will remain stuck in a Groundhog Day-like cycle of ugly sausage-making and even worse fiscal decision-making.