City stakeholders must prove efficiency before demanding sacrifice from taxpayers. Also, energy storage legislation, a reminder to Americans at a time when anti-immigration sentiment is high, and a chuckle over a Malort reference.
Oct 6, 2025, 6:00am CST
The city must look within its own departments to reduce waste before asking taxpayers to sacrifice, writes County Board Commissioner George A. Cardenas.
Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times
Every year, Chicago taxpayers hear the same thing: Pension costs are rising, state and federal aid has dried up, and there is a new round of “progressive revenues.” Although the words sound well-intentioned, the reality is that there is little real structural change from year to year, and the proposed “progressive revenues” often fall hardest on working families.
Convened by Mayor Brandon Johnson, the Chicago Financial Future Task Force wrote, “When a budget has a structural imbalance, it persistently has more expenses than revenues, even when the economy is strong.”
Responding to the report, the Civic Federation wrote, “Overall, the report contributes to and spurs critical conversations needed in the fall budget season, but does not provide long-term solutions to the City’s structural budget problems.”
Simply put, the operative word is structure.
To start, one must concede that Chicago’s structural budget deficits aren’t necessarily proof of mismanagement. Rather, they are historical faulty frameworks, that due to their design, will eventually implode. Therefore, City Hall needs to address its framework, rather than focusing on indexing specific taxes or limited personnel changes.
Look at the lives of Chicagoans. Leaders talk about taxing “luxury services,” but let’s be clear, residents in our 77 neighborhoods don’t care about whether a tax is “progressive” or “regressive.” They care that their haircuts, manicures, car washes and supermarket spending are within their budgets.
Other cities have faced similar fiscal challenges and have worked to address them head-on.
We cannot ask working families to pay more — under the banner of “progressivity”— until we show them that we’ve done everything possible to reform the structure of government. That means auditing city of Chicago departments, reducing redundancies, leveraging technology and negotiating fair but firm concessions with labor. We must prove efficiency before we demand additional sacrifice from the taxpayers.
Let’s think about our tax system with surgical precision. Our city’s decision makers need to do work on structure, not Band-Aids. First, do no harm to the taxpayer. Second, the cure cannot be worse than the malady. Our 77 neighborhoods and the working families who live in them deserve nothing less and must be allowed to live without further pain inflected by their governments.
George A. Cardenas, former City Council member and current Cook County Board of Review Commissioner, 1st District