In a few weeks, a working group appointed by Mayor Brandon Johnson is scheduled to provide preliminary recommendations on how to address Chicago’s budget crisis.

We have little doubt, given the mayor’s understandable concerns about the city’s $1 billion-plus budget shortfall for 2026, that we’ll see a work product from that group. How useful it is remains to be seen, but there will be something to read.

We wish we could say the same about another mayoral working group that Johnson disbanded recently. That ad hoc body, which Johnson created in mid-2023 to confront the city’s desperately underfunded municipal pensions, will provide exactly zero recommendations on how to address that crisis.

The mayor acknowledged last week that the group was dissolved without producing a report, a damning indictment both of the internal operations of City Hall and how this mayor doesn’t take seriously the cost side of Chicago’s ledger while obsessing over finding more revenue to feed the government beast.

The two issues — pensions and the city’s structural fiscal woes — are tied together inextricably. The main reason taxpayers keep seeing their taxes, fees and fines rise while government services barely improve is the ever-increasing cost of meeting obligations tied to Chicago’s four employee pension funds.

Chicago is paying $2.9 billion this year for pensions, 17% of its total $17.1 billion budget. That is by far the highest percentage of any major U.S. city. For example, New York City, which also has a pension-debt issue, allocated 9% of its budget to pensions in fiscal 2025. Chicago would love for its pensions to eat up just 9% of its budget.

Chicago’s pension problem just got exponentially more dire with Gov. JB Pritzker’s signing earlier this month of legislation substantially sweetening retirement benefits for Chicago police and firefighters who’d been hired after 2010 — so-called Tier 2 employees. That measure alone added $11 billion to Chicago’s pre-existing $36 billion pile of pension debt, a mind-boggling 30% increase. Police and fire pension funds that had just 25% of the assets needed to meet present and future obligations saw that percentage reduced to just 18% in one fell swoop.

If Johnson’s pension working group had managed to produce any recommendations, we’d have hoped that close to the top of the list would have been not to dig the city’s pension hole any deeper. Or, certainly not any deeper than what is minimally necessary to comply with federal rules requiring that pension benefits at least match what Social Security would provide.

Instead, Chicago got crickets. As recently as last April, we asked the mayor’s office when the pension report would be released and were told at the time that it would be “within the next two weeks barring unforeseen edits.” Two weeks came and went; we checked back on the matter a month later. We were told the group “needed to go back and do some more work on it.”

But it was coming, we were assured. Sort of the municipal-government equivalent of the “check is in the mail,” we guess.

Let’s go back to the establishment of the pension working group. In the opening months of his mayoral term, Johnson rightly identified pension debt as perhaps the most important issue affecting Chicago’s future. The group he appointed, unfortunately, was made up mainly of public sector union leaders and Democratic lawmakers allied with those unions. There was virtually no representation for taxpayers and businesses.

So given its composition the group wasn’t likely to offer bold ideas for securing Chicago’s future solvency. Johnson apparently quickly realized as much because a year after the group’s formation the administration sharply narrowed its focus from a broad look at the crisis to merely ensuring Tier 2 benefits are compliant with federal law.

Even given that simple task, the group couldn’t make what should have been an easy call. Johnson told reporters last week that members of the ad hoc panel who supported the unaffordable and unfunded sweeteners signed by Pritzker won the internal debate.

Johnson called the result “a disappointment.”

What’s disappointing is evidence once again of a lack of leadership from this mayor. When you appoint a working group made up overwhelmingly of those representing public sector unions and their political supporters, what sort of result do you expect? Do you expect them to call for sacrifice for their members? Do you expect them to give taxpayers any consideration?

Apart from continuing his predecessor’s practice of paying more into Chicago’s pension funds than is minimally required, Johnson has failed on the issue that is most threatening to Chicago’s future.

That failure is symbolized most starkly in the mute dissolution of his own group, formed to help save Chicago from its pension morass but which instead silently acquiesced in making that threat markedly worse. A group whose members couldn’t even summon the courage to give official voice to further imperiling Chicago’s fiscal health and simply slunk away, knowing their favored outcome would win the day anyway.

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https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/08/12/editorial-pensions-chicago-brandon-johnson-working-group/