Left to Solve For

On December 2nd, 2025, twenty-three Chicago alderpersons sent the mayor a letter with a spreadsheet attached.

The spreadsheet has two columns. The left: kill the head tax, make the full pension payment, pay the firefighters their back pay without borrowing. Total: $441,400,000. The right is how they proposed to pay for it. It also totaled $441,400,000.

The last line: Left to Solve For — $0.00.

The promise says: we didn’t stop at objection, we did the legwork. The money is here, the budget book closes. But you shouldn’t publish a number and ask that nobody tally it up.

So I tallied it. The spreadsheet answers how much. It doesn’t answer who.

Mayor Brandon Johnson and his office presented a Community Safety Surcharge. The corpo-political machine branded it a head tax before the ink dried: $21.00 per employee per month, on employers with 100 or more full-time workers, at least half in Chicago. Budgeted at $100,000,000, and dedicated to violence prevention, youth employment, survivor support, and officer wellness. The mayor was investing, again, in the places our city has neglected. The City’s budget describes the surcharge as applying “only to the largest 3% of businesses — those with 100 or more employees — ensuring that 97% of small and medium-sized employers are unaffected.“

By December it narrowed again, to employers with 500 or more — fewer employers, at a higher rate of $33 per employee. The concession shrank the base and kept the target.

This isn’t a new idea. In 1973, City Council passed a head tax that took effect on New Year’s Day. The rate then was $3 a month per employee on every employer with fifteen or more. The Illinois Supreme Court upheld it that summer, and it ran for 40 years. Former Mayor Rahm Emanuel called the tax a job killer and cut it in half. By 2014 it was gone.

Three dollars in 1974 is about $20 today. The price index is the federal government’s and the conversion is mine. Mayor Johnson’s initial proposal was $21. In the end, the Council struck the safety of Chicagoans to zero, and replaced that safety with:

• Improved Debt Collections — $150,000,000. Unpaid tickets, fines, utility bills. In the ordinance that actually passed, this became authorization to sell city debt “sufficient to generate not less than $89,600,000” to a collection agency by April 1st, 2026.
• Increase Garbage Fee to $18 w/ Exemption for Seniors — $55,000,000.
• Congestion Fee — $48,000,000.
• Liquor Tax @ 3% of Off Premise Sales — $24,000,000.

The Remainder

The only line item not centered on the shoulders of working families is Augmented Reality Advertising — $26,000,000.

A plan to sell companies the right to place virtual ads “on” City property, through a broker who takes a cut. The trade group for Chicago’s commercial building owners has already been offering its members a similar arrangement, broker included — the same group that quoted to Bloomberg that the head tax “penalizes employers for creating jobs.”

By the vote, seventeen days later, the coalition had cut its own $26,000,000 to $6,000,000. Through July, the City has collected nothing.

None of the four household lines is a tax on income, profit, or property. They are fines, fees, and the sale of what Chicagoans already owe — revenue raised by enforcement instead of assessment. Johnson’s written message to the Council named the mechanism plainly, rejecting the “reliance on the sale of involuntary debt to third-party collectors whose aggressive and predatory practices disproportionately burden working families across the city.”

The City’s budget book shows what that debt is. In 2025 the Department of Finance ran a four-month parking-violation amnesty: pay the original fine in full and the penalties and costs come off. More than 100,000 drivers took it. They paid $15.7 million in fines and saved $16.4 million in penalties and costs — for the people who came forward, the surcharge for not paying on time had already grown larger than the ticket. And 100,000 is a floor, not a count. It includes only people who could come up with the whole original fine inside a four-month window. That is the well the Council voted to sell.

Who are the working families across the city carrying this debt?

In February 2018, ProPublica Illinois matched Chicago ticket data from 2007-2017 against Census figures, and found that eight of the ten ZIP codes with the most accumulated ticket debt per adult were majority Black. Those neighborhoods held 40 percent of the debt. They got 22 percent of the tickets.

The gap between the two numbers is the finding. Not where tickets get written. Where a ticket stops being a fine and starts being debt — where a parking ticket can end up a ticket to bankruptcy.

The data is on tickets, not drivers. It shows where the debt settles.

In the fall of 2011, Emanuel’s first budget cut the head tax in half.

The City’s overview of that budget is still on its website, and it says what the cut was worth: $20 million a year “returned to these businesses.” The same budget raised water and sewer rates by a quarter. It promised a “new aggressive approach” to collecting unpaid parking tickets. It added a congestion charge on downtown parking. And in the negotiations over it, the fine for not having a city sticker went from $120 to $200.

The Council passed that budget without a single dissenting vote.

ProPublica and WBEZ found that this brought in a few million dollars more a year. By 2018, drivers owed the City $275 million on sticker tickets written since 2012. With penalties, a $200 ticket could reach $488. Those penalties hit hardest on working families.

Mayor Johnson says working families, and it is the conventionally acceptable way to name the people a policy is about to hurt without being accused of favoritism. Chicago’s budget counts her population at 2,746,388 people: 28.8 percent Black, 29.0 percent Hispanic or Latino, per the 2024 Census. The gag is: 28.8 percent of the people, 40 percent of the debt, and eight of those ten ZIP codes majority Black. These are the working families from the crib, carrying the debt, subject to new aggressive approaches.

With exemption for seniors. We wouldn’t have to carve seniors out of a tax on the corporations. The exemption is an admission. They know who’ll feel it most, and they carved out the one group whose backlash would be sympathetic.

The largest column entry: Additional EY Efficiencies — $90,600,000. EY is Ernst & Young, the consulting firm.

The attachment breaks it into fourteen items, each carrying a dollar range, and prints its own total: $63.7M - $90.6M. I added them. The lows sum to the first figure. The highs sum to the second.

On the medical claims audit: “it is not certain that assumed recovery rates will materialize.” Book the bottom of their own range instead and the package is short $26,900,000, by my subtraction. Left to Solve For — $0.00 holds only if every uncertain thing pays out at its maximum, including the parts requiring the agreement of people who were not in the room.

Roughly half that money, $30.4 million against the low and $39.1 million against the high, comes from five items filed under Employee Benefits Efficiency. Verbatim: “Increase employee out-of-pocket maximums, copays, and offer High-Deductible plans.” “Increase employee premium contributions for PPO plans; remove salary caps to employee contributions… and introduce surcharges for working spouses and tobacco users.” Eliminate the HMO’s stop-loss coverage.

The money that replaces the head tax comes out of the pockets of people who work for the City — and the City’s budget says 89 percent of them have benefit plans set by collective bargaining.

Working families.

The reasons they gave

The letter from the alderpeople isn’t coy about the goal. It opens with the credit rating downgrade in January, the cost of borrowing, a warning that Chicago is “nearing junk level creditworthiness.” Their case was that a hiring tax was the wrong instrument at the wrong moment, and the alternative was deterioration the city couldn’t afford.

That’s a prediction, and predictions resolve.

On February 25th, 2026, Fitch downgraded Chicago’s issuer default rating and general obligation bonds to BBB+ from A−, outlook negative. The next day KBRA did the same. The Council’s own Office of Financial Analysis reported both.

Among Fitch’s stated reasons: “the still high dependence on non-structural solutions and assumptions underpinning the adopted 2026 budget.”

Non-structural solutions. Assumptions. That is the coalition’s own objection to the head tax, handed back to them, pointed at the budget they wrote instead — and “assumptions” is a fair description of booking the top of a range whose own footnotes say labor negotiations are required.

Fitch also cited “ongoing disagreements between the administration and the city council.” A disagreement takes two, so that one isn’t theirs alone. The cleanest finding: our city’s fiduciaries traded away the head tax to avoid a downgrade, then were downgraded for relying on the irregular revenue they should have been protecting us from.

The letter’s attachment calls the head tax “a tax on the employment Chicagoans need.” A hiring tax “is not appropriate for our reality.”

Another prediction! This time, Chicago had already run it.

When Emanuel moved to end the old tax in October 2011, his press release promised phasing it out would “help encourage businesses to hire more employees.” He announced it ten weeks after his office projected a $635.7 million gap, the eleventh budget in a row to open with one. All eleven had the head tax on the books. The tax didn’t unbalance those budgets; removing it wouldn’t balance the next. In 2014, the first year of its removal, the gap was $338.7 million.

On November 10th, 2025, the City’s budget director answered a question Alderperson Brendan Reilly asked at a budget hearing about employment after the repeal. Her memo found no bend in Chicago’s job trend at the announcement, at the cut, or at the repeal. Instead, the City gave up about $23 million a year “without benefiting from a structural economic return.”

WBEZ and the Sun-Times pulled fourteen years of the City’s own head-tax records, had four economists and labor experts review the work, and published a week before the vote. They found no evidence that the tax, or its repeal, moved jobs in either direction.

Illinois counts private-sector jobs by where the job is. In the three years to March 2013, with the tax still on the books, jobs inside Chicago grew 7.7 percent and jobs in the rest of the six-county region grew 4.9. In the five years after the tax was gone: 8.7 and 5.3. The city led its suburbs by the same margin before and after.

One finding cuts the coalition’s way, and it belongs to the Santa Clara University economist that WBEZ consulted, Audrey Guo. Her research finds that payroll taxes slow hiring at small, young firms. She told them she would worry more about a head tax on every employer “than the way it’s currently designed.” This one exempted every employer under five hundred workers. WBEZ put the average salary at the firms that were left at about $111,000. Thirty-three dollars a month against that is a third of one percent.

The other ledger

Neither reason held. Chicagoans pay either way. So who was this for?

The head tax died in the 2026 Municipal Code Revenue Ordinance (Alternative), moved by Alderperson Pat Dowell, on December 19th, 2025, by 29 to 19. That is forty-eight of fifty: Vasquez asked the record to show a No he couldn’t cast remotely, and Coleman isn’t recorded — the Council’s Journal gives no reason. Twenty-two of the twenty-three signers voted yes. None voted no. They were twenty-two of the twenty-nine votes that carried it — take them out and the measure has seven.

The next day the ordinance carrying the debt sale passed 29 to 20, and not with the same twenty-nine. Yancy crossed off, Moore crossed on, Coleman appeared, Silverstein went unrecorded. A core of twenty held both, with movement at the edges — a coalition.

It is also not a new one. Forty-four members were recorded on three roll calls that have nothing to do with each other: the Gaza ceasefire resolution in January 2024, the failed override of the mayor’s curfew veto in July 2025, and this one. Twenty-two alders voted the same way all three times: against the ceasefire, for the override, for killing the tax. Fifteen voted the opposite way all three times, and seven crossed. Six of the twenty-two never signed the letter.

A war, a curfew and a tax. What holds twenty-two alders together across those three is the subject.

I went looking for what they share that is on file. The Illinois State Board of Elections publishes every receipt a campaign committee reports. I pulled the committees of all forty-eight members who voted on December 19th, from January 2023, the year this council was elected, through the vote.

Start with one name.

Michael Sacks is chairman and chief executive of GCM Grosvenor, a Chicago asset manager. By his Tribune byline, he spent eight years as vice chairman of World Business Chicago under Emanuel, who abolished Chicago’s last head tax. Since January 2023, he or his wife, Cari, has given to the campaign committees of twenty-five of the twenty-nine alderpersons who voted to kill this one. Of the nineteen who voted to keep it, three.

The twenty-two who held together across the ceasefire, the curfew and the tax are all among the twenty-five.

In the 2023 election, Sacks put $1,000,000 into a political action committee called Get Stuff Done. That was 52 percent of everything it raised, by my sum of its state filings, and that committee then spent in ward races across the city.

Sixteen of the candidates it backed won.

Of those sixteen, eleven voted to kill the tax, four voted to keep it, and one, Coleman, wasn’t recorded. Get Stuff Done spent against two candidates, Sigcho-Lopez and Clay, and backed the four who lost to Sigcho-Lopez, Clay, Ramirez and Manaa-Hoppenworth. All four of those winners voted to keep the tax. The three no votes who took Sacks’s checks, Ervin, Taliaferro and Robinson, are three of the four the committee had backed.

Then came the fight itself. On December 4th, two days after the letter, Bloomberg reported that a group backed by Sacks, Common Ground Collective, had started funding six-figure ad buys against the tax, and that it had raised $11 million from more than 100 contributors. It wasn’t alone: a second committee, One Future Illinois, whose president is a former Emanuel adviser, was running its own ads, and Governor Pritzker had come out against the tax in October. Johnson named Sacks at a press conference that week, and Sacks declined to comment to Bloomberg. His group said it stood by its facts, and its case was the one the coalition made in writing, that the Community Safety Fund put no new money into public safety. The group’s two state committees weren’t created until December 15th, and both reported spending nothing through December 31st. No public file records what paid for a December ad. The money the record allows is the group’s nonprofit, whose donors no file names.

His isn’t the only name that runs down that column. I said earlier that their labels were better evidence than a number I built, so I won’t sort these donors into categories. I’ll use the names on the receipts. Realtors’ political committees: twenty-five of the twenty-nine, four of the nineteen. United Airlines: twenty-four and four. Amazon: nineteen and two. The Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce: sixteen and one. The building owners’ association from the augmented reality line: twenty-two and three. The Chicago Teachers Union runs the other way, three and eleven. And some money doesn’t choose: the carpenters’ union gave to all twenty-nine and to seventeen of the nineteen. Campaigns spell a donor’s name a dozen ways, so I matched the spellings by hand, and two committees hold more receipts than the state’s site will display, so these counts can only run low. The receipts are the state’s and the matching is mine.

The TRiiBE asked two signers that December. Scott: “Not by donors and not by interest groups.” Dowell said she had “never been influenced by donors.”

The money came first. Most of it moved in the 2023 election, two and a half years before the roll call. WGN’s lead was that Sacks had been filling campaign accounts “before the mayor proposed reviving Chicago’s corporate head tax.”

The money does cross the line. WGN reported that Sacks gave $200,000 to Johnson’s inauguration committee. Yancy, Mosley, Gardiner and Cruz took nothing from either Sacks in those three years and voted to kill the tax anyway.

Johnson ran on a head tax in 2023, and the council that killed it came out of that same election. The money shows who shaped that council: these candidates, against those.

The similarities color within the lines of influence.

Evidence of absence

On March 24th, 2026, the Tribune ran an op-ed by Sacks titled “Why I support AIPAC and a big tent Democratic Party.” He writes that he backed AIPAC from the late 1980s until 2017, stepped away over its opposition to the Iran nuclear deal, and “did not reengage until after Oct. 7, 2023.” Then he asked AIPAC how he could help keep Chicago from sending more people to Congress who would deny Israel defensive weapons. He also writes that he doesn’t agree with everything Israel or AIPAC does, and that he supports a two-state solution.

The filings show what followed. In March 2024 he gave $250,000 to United Democracy Project, AIPAC’s super PAC. In October 2024 he gave $300,000 to Zioness PAC, a super PAC registered eight days earlier. On February 6th, 2026, he gave $1.5 million to three local super PACs working that March’s congressional primaries, two of which had taken $5.3 million from United Democracy Project four days earlier. He describes it himself: AIPAC backed four House candidates “through super political action committees with support from local Democrats like me.”

The federal file shows nothing from him to either AIPAC committee before March 2024. It couldn’t. AIPAC doesn’t name its donors, and had no committee to report them until the 2022 cycle.

The Joint Action Committee for Political Affairs calls itself “the pro-Israel PAC with a domestic conscience.” From 2002 through 2010 the Sackses gave to it together, some years on a single line reading “Michael & Cari,” with his firm listed as the employer. Since 2011 the gifts carried her name alone. From 2017, the year he says he stepped away from AIPAC, through 2026, she gave $5,000 every year without a miss. In the years he says he was away, the household’s pro-Israel giving did not pause.

Evidence of absence does not mean absence of action. His firm stopped doing business with Chicago’s public pension funds in 2004 and with Cook County’s in 2011, and in 2015 a Grosvenor spokeswoman told Pensions & Investments that removing himself at those levels “allows (Mr. Sacks) to be engaged, whether it’s politically or civically.” The federal pay-to-play rule for money managers is built the same way: a $500 check in an executive’s own name can cost the firm two years of fees with no intent shown, and a check in a spouse’s name costs nothing unless the SEC proves the executive directed or funded it.

What the dates do show: the aldermanic money came before the return he describes, and the Council’s ceasefire vote after it. It is evidence about where the money comes from.

What it moved

The comfortable version of this argument says structures do this. Nobody intended it. Harm at this scale is weather — it accumulates, it has no author, and the honest thing is to describe the mechanism and assign no blame. Structural analysis gets used that way constantly, and when used that way it becomes an alibi.

In reality, structures are made of decisions. The votes have dates. So do the checks.

They knew who would pay. The senior exemption is knowledge, written into the same column as the fee it protects against. And they were told the rest out loud. Johnson’s transmittal refused the debt sale, in writing, in the Journal, before the roll call. The next day they passed it 29 to 20.

They were told about the jobs, too. Reilly asked the question himself. He had the budget office’s answer on November 10th. He signed the letter on December 2nd. On December 19th he voted to kill the tax.

Johnson did not sign the budget. He also did not veto it, and he could have. I read that as the decision: not vetoing, so he wouldn’t be the stubborn one. Overriding a veto takes two-thirds of the Council. In July 2025 the Council tried to override him on police curfew powers, put all fifty members on the roll, and failed at 28 to 22. The four budget ordinances (revenue, the appropriation text, the appropriation as amended and the management ordinance) carried 29, 30, 30 and 29. A veto would have held. What a held veto produces is the rest of the sentence: no appropriation ordinance, twelve days before the fiscal year began.

The coalition argued its part in advance and in writing: the letter says the Community Safety Fund was never new public safety money. $18 million of the $100 million funded a new “Community Business Grants” program they called a gimmick. The other $82 million was spending the Corporate Fund already carried, some of it replacing expiring federal pandemic money. Eighteen and eighty-two: their two figures add to exactly $100 million. Their ledger says the surviving items go back where they were the year before. When the fund was zeroed, the City’s books show it struck on both sides at once, revenue and spending together. The same package also created a dedicated fund out of a new social media tax, zero to $31,000,000. They didn’t only take things away.

The Council’s analyst measured the total distance between the mayor’s proposal and the adopted budget: $258.4 million. One-point-six percent.

That’s the whole fight. A season of it, a mayor’s central revenue measure, twenty-three signatures, four roll calls — and the budget moved 1.6%.

One-point-six percent measures size and says nothing about who the distance landed on. A budget can barely move in total yet shift completely in who pays for it, the number at the bottom holding still while the question of who pays it changed hands. The fight was never about anything but who.

On February 19th, a court ordered the City to forgive $98.3 million in parking ticket fines — the same well the debt sale was drawing from.

The ordinance said the sale had to close by April 1st. It didn’t. The City’s revenue report through July carries a line called Sale of City Debt, budgeted at $89,600,000, with nothing on it. Two more lines in the same report are empty: Advertising Revenue, budgeted at $29,300,000, and Augmented Reality, at $6,000,000. Those three lines add to $124,900,000. That is money the coalition wrote into the budget, and the City has collected none of it.

In July, the same Office of Financial Analysis published its FY2026 Mid-Year Report, and among the revenue options it put in front of the Council are a Congestion Fee Expansion and a Garbage Fee Increase — $55.38 million to $211.75 million. Two of the four household lines from that column, back on the table. The list also includes reinstating the grocery tax, which the budget book had boasted about avoiding.

And one more, at the top: an Administrative Hearings Amnesty Period, $8.70 million to $98.15 million. Waive the accumulated late fees, interest and penalties, if people pay the original fine.

The Council’s analyst is now proposing the City forgive penalties on debt the Council voted to sell to a collection agency, as a way to raise money.

Forgiveness works as revenue because of how the debt is built. That office reports the City is owed roughly $3.27 billion in outstanding administrative hearing debt, accumulated since 1998. In the one set of records where it could see original fines next to balances, building-code hearings, it found a 13.3 percent fine-to-debt ratio, and used that as its conservative benchmark. Thirteen cents of every dollar owed is the thing somebody actually did. The rest is what happened to them for not paying it fast enough.

That is the right-hand column of the spreadsheet, itemized. Not the fine: what grew on the fine while it went unpaid, authorized for sale to the collectors the mayor’s message called predatory. Twenty-three alderpersons wrote that column to pay for the left one, and the left one starts with the tax they kept off employers with five hundred workers or more.

The money has moved on. On August 20th, 2026, the Common Ground Collective, the group whose ads ran against the head tax, staffed an arts-and-crafts table at the back-to-school fair at Peirce Elementary in Edgewater and paid for the DJ. Its fliers, in English and Spanish, were about the school board election, with a QR code to its website, where its endorsements went up four days later. It had introduced itself to the principal by email as “a 501(c)(4) nonprofit and advocacy organization dedicated to strengthening our CPS schools.” The group says its nonprofit paid for the table and the DJ, not its two political arms. WBEZ and the Sun-Times reported it on September 23rd, from the emails and the parents on the Local School Council. CPS’s ethics office is investigating.

Its political arms were busy elsewhere. Between September 2nd and 22nd, Sacks wrote the group’s super PAC three checks: $900,000, $1,500,000 and $1,000,000. The committee’s first money, the previous December, had been $500,000 from him and $450,000 from the nonprofit. Chalkbeat counted just over $2,000,000 of it spent on school board advertising since July 15th, more than $500,000 of that opposing Hilario Dominguez, the union-backed candidate for board president.

The Community Safety Fund was $100,000,000 for violence prevention, youth employment, survivor support and officer wellness. The Council struck it to zero. Nine months later the children at Peirce got a DJ.

The spreadsheet’s last line still says $0.00. The number was right. The money was never what was left to solve for. Who was.

Updated October 6th, 2026. This essay first ran on September 1st without the sections “The other ledger” and “Evidence of absence.” Those were added on October 2nd, with the history of the 1974 head tax, the 2012 budget and the jobs record, and the paragraphs on augmented reality advertising and the debt sale were rewritten from the City budget office’s reports through July. On October 6th the closing section was rewritten to follow the money into the school board election. Campaign-finance figures come from Illinois State Board of Elections and Federal Election Commission filings pulled on October 2nd and October 6th.