CHICAGO — Renegade Chicago aldermen battling with Mayor Brandon Johnson over competing 2026 budgets announced tweaks to their proposal Monday morning, but withheld critical details.

The City Council majority group is dropping its plan to raise the garbage pickup fee, Ald. Gilbert Villegas, 36th, said in a statement. The group will also maintain youth summer job funding at levels first proposed by Johnson after previously pushing for a smaller amount, Villegas said.

The changes are an apparent bid to convince more colleagues to join them and blunt Johnson’s near-daily criticism that their package would hurt working-class Chicagoans.

Johnson said Monday of the latest tweaks, “hopefully this is a sign that, through our advocacy for working people, these members understand the importance of not passing budgets that disproportionately impact people already experiencing Trump cuts and struggling to make the ends meet.”

Johnson had pledged to veto a budget with a garbage fee increase. He did not respond directly Monday when asked whether he would veto the alternate budget now that such an increase has been removed.

But the mayoral opponents omitted the hard part by declining to say how they would be able to balance the budget while adding those costs and cutting fees.

They had previously counted on their garbage fee hike to bring in $35 million and said their cuts to youth job spending would save $6.2 million, so they need new fees, taxes or cuts to replace that money in order to make the math work.

“We’ve seen nothing,” Ald. Jason Ervin, the City Council’s Budget Committee chair and a close Johnson ally, said Monday. “The devil is in the details in all of these things. We need to know and understand how this budget is balanced.”

And Johnson referred at his Monday news conference to “some exaggerated projections” from opponents for 2026, which he called irresponsible budget management that would increase the city’s deficit.

More details could come quickly as a group of the aldermen at odds with Johnson are set to meet with him Monday afternoon at City Hall. But the clock is ticking: Johnson and the City Council must pass a budget by the end of the year to avoid breaking state law and suffering murky, but surely destructive consequences.

And with just two holiday-filled weeks to get the job done, Johnson remains far from a majority of the 50-member council supporting his budget, while the backers of the aldermen’s competing budget are similarly distant from the supermajority of at least 34 votes they would need to overcome a possible mayoral veto.

Backers of the alternative budget led a charge last week to fill the City Council’s schedule with four meetings in four days, a move they said was needed to speed up negotiations. But around 30 members of the same group did not show up for the first such meeting Monday, a clearly coordinated decision that prevented a quorum needed to start the meeting.

During an impromptu news conference after the meeting failed to commence, progressives and other Johnson allies who attended said they received no notice from their competing colleagues.

“People have been working all through the weekend, but I think just to decency and respect, you call the meeting, you show up for the meeting,” Ervin said. “I’m disappointed that our colleagues have not decided to show up today to do the business of the people.”

Ervin and the other supporters of Johnson’s budget had little to say about the tweaked counter-proposal.

Pressed on whether changes will come to Johnson’s own 2026 package, which has already been decisively voted down in the Finance Committee and opposed in two petitions by City Council majorities, Ervin said he was open to proposed changes and waiting on others “to put something on the table that makes sense.”

“In life, I’ve determined that I’m not going to bargain against myself,” he said.

The largest sticking point for aldermen opposed to Johnson’s proposal remains his plan to reinstate a head tax at $33 a month for every worker at companies with more than 500 Chicago employees. Some progressive aldermen who do not oppose the head tax have also said they oppose Johnson’s plans to borrow money to pay for police settlements and firefighter back pay, as well as his plan to cut short a previously planned advanced pension payment.

On the other side, the tweaked counter-proposal announced Monday also includes a full restoration of the Chicago Public Library collections budget, as well as unspecified “additional funding” for gender-based violence programs, Villegas said.

The proposal’s biggest change, cutting plans to double garbage fees, could win over aldermen who complained that hike would hit working-class Chicagoans too hard.

Villegas said the plan now “represents the position of an even broader number of alders than we had just a few days ago.” He did not specify how many aldermen support the plan or who had been convinced to support it.

His statement referred to the changed plan as a “final proposal.”

_____

©2025 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.