“Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson secured approval for his $830 million borrowing plan…The city just grew its nearly $41 billion in debt,” which will rise by $2 billion due to the borrowing plan, reports the Illinois Policy Institute:
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson on Feb. 26 secured enough votes to pass an $830 million borrowing plan by selling bonds for infrastructure projects.
While Chicago is making its massive debt problem worse…Alderman Brendan Reilly motioned to postpone voting on Johnson’s massive borrowing package until May, requesting time for proper analysis and potential revisions.
In response, a countermotion was quickly introduced to set aside Reilly’s delay attempt. The vote on whether to kill Reilly’s motion ended in a perfect 25-25 tie. Johnson then broke the tie by casting the 26th vote to end Reilly’s delay attempt.
Chicago is the only big city in the nation where the mayor directly presides over the City Council. His vote then allowed the Council to decide on the borrowing package, approving it 26-23….The plan makes no payments on the debt for the first two years and defers principal payments for an additional 18 years afterward. This backloaded structure means the total cost will reach $2 billion, a burden primarily on future Chicagoans.
Chicago faces $40.9 billion in unpaid bills, including public pension debt. That makes each Chicagoan responsible for eventually paying $40,600 to fix the city’s fiscal mess.
80% of Chicago residents disapprove of Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson, making him perhaps the least popular politician in America. But if he ran against a Republican, he might still win reelection, because Chicago is a progressive city that seems to hate Republicans more than it values its own future.
Newsweek notes,
A recent poll from M3 Strategies, conducted between February 20 and 21, showed the Democrat — who is just two years into his tenure — with a 6.6 percent approval, one of the worst showings for any major political figure in the country’s history.
Johnson took office in May 2023. In October of that year, his approval rating was already down to 28 percent. Those numbers fell to 14 percent a year later, and then halved again in the four months since.
Johnson’s predecessor, Lori Lightfoot, wasn’t particularly popular, either. She “left office with just 22 percent approval.” But rather than replacing her with someone better, Chicago voters replaced her with someone worse — Brandon Johnson, the candidate promoted by the left-wing Chicago Teachers Union.
Johnson’s unpopularity is due partly to the crime issue:
crime was, far and away, the top issue for Chicagoans, with 67 percent ranking it as the city’s biggest problem. The other major issues reported by respondents included high taxes (54 percent) and immigration (24 percent).
Crime in Chicago has been on the rise in recent years…Arrest rates for violent crimes have also declined. In 2024, arrests were made in about 1 in 7 violent crime cases, according to the Illinois Policy Institute, continuing a downward trend over the past two decades. Johnson has instituted several controversial crime-related policies, including discontinuing the city’s contract with ShotSpotter, a gunshot detection system that had been in use since 2012.
Overall, the number of major felony offenses in the city (which include murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, grand larceny and grand larceny of a motor vehicle) climbed 44 percent between 2021 and 2024.
Johnson forced out school board members who objected to fiscally-irresponsible policies promoted by the Chicago Teachers Union, which has played a key role in making Chicago’s schools dysfunctional. The mayor also pushed to remove the Chicago school superintendent after he objected to fiscally irresponsible school policies, resulting in the school board voting to fire the superintendent.
Due to unnecessary spending, “Chicago Public Schools is in dire financial straits, yet Chicago Teachers Union blocks” the “closing of near-empty, failing schools,” reports WirePoints.
Indeed, the union wants more staff to be hired for schools that are almost entirely empty and have hardly any students. “Illinois Policy Institute Policy Analyst Hannah Schmid said the Chicago Teachers Union is emboldened with Johnson in the mayor’s office.” “We’re seeing these extreme demands” like the demands for “nine new staff members at every school, even those schools with 4% of their building filled with students,’ Schmid told Center Square.
Breaking campaign promises, Chicago’s left-wing mayor, Brandon Johnson, has sought to get rid of high-achieving high-schools in the name of “equity.”
Chicago’s mayor has proposed left-wing policies that would shrink the quantity and quality of housing in the city.
Thousands of Chicago school laptops have been stolen and ended up in China, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.
