Either Brandon Johnson or Paul Vallas will become the first Chicagoan in 40 years to unseat an incumbent mayor — but whoever wins will inherit a towering to-do list upon assuming leadership of a city plagued by dissatisfaction with its government as well as a decades-in-the-making crisis of gun violence and looming fiscal cliffs.
Come May, the prevailing candidate is expected to bring with him an equally voluminous stack of proposals in the hopes of reversing what has landed the nation’s third-largest city in its current plight. What direction that agenda will take depends on whether the unapologetically progressive Johnson, a Cook County commissioner who has railed against the “politics of old,” or the more conservative Vallas, a former Chicago Public Schools CEO who vouched that his past experience would get the city “back on track,” wins.
Both candidates boasted remarkable ascents — Vallas from being a perennially unsuccessful candidate to the top vote-getter among nine contenders the night he made the runoff, and Johnson from little-known county official to knocking off an incumbent for the second slot.
While the final tally between the unalike candidates is expected to be close, the early elimination of Mayor Lori Lightfoot in February’s first round signaled a widespread desire for change.
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Number one on the next mayor’s agenda of problems to crack? Crime, a Chicago perpetual dilemma that has flared in urgency over the past three years.
As a worldwide, deadly pandemic and civil unrest over the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd halted the city in its tracks, shootings intensified in the most violent neighborhoods and advanced elsewhere too, casting a pall stretching from downtown to long-disinvested blocks on the South and West sides.
It was that ubiquitous fear that perhaps united Chicago to seal Lightfoot’s fate as the first sitting mayor to lose reelection since 1983, even though the recent crime wave was one observed across the nation.
Chicago’s sheer volume of shootings remains exceptional, however.
Last year, Chicago recorded about 700 homicides — an improvement from the historic 2021 spike that saw the city’s worst bloodshed since the mid-1990s, but a staggering toll nonetheless. It still outpaces 2019 levels by nearly 40% as well as the annual totals from Chicago’s more-populous peers, New York and Los Angeles.
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So far this year, homicides are slightly lower compared to the same period in 2022, but robberies have spiked by more than one-third and batteries are up nearly 20%.
Meanwhile, the city’s financial health remains on treacherous footing.
Under Lightfoot, City Hall has made real strides in shoring up city finances, but the mayor’s budget office and outside experts project a deficit between $500 million and $600 million heading into 2024. And her successor almost certainly won’t have a cushion of federal funds to rely on.
Chicago’s pension funds — among the most depleted in the country — took a critical tumble during 2022′s downturn in stock market fortunes. The local economy’s future is uncertain as tourism, CTA ridership and office and retail occupancy have not climbed back to 2019 levels.
If the prospect of these overlapping turmoils deterred either Vallas or Johnson ahead of the election, the candidates did not show it.
Asked at a March debate to name “something tangible” he would accomplish within his first 100 days in office, Vallas opened with a sky-high goal: guaranteeing that 75 to 85% of the Chicago police force will be patrolling the streets, versus in supervisory or administrative roles.
Johnson followed up with his own ambitious promise: doubling youth employment.
A former Chicago budget director and CPS chief under Mayor Richard M. Daley in the 1990s, Vallas, 69, has never held elected office but did lead other school districts in Philadelphia, New Orleans and Bridgeport, Connecticut. That resume has followed him on the campaign trail, with former associates vouching for his wonkish approach and vision of reform while a just-as-spirited faction of detractors argued he privatized public education and mismanaged budgets.
Meanwhile, Johnson, 47, has deep ties to the influential Chicago Teachers Union, which has long clamored for changes that go far beyond CPS’ scope. But Johnson’s connections to the CTU, where he’s been a paid organizer over the past decade, also dogged him on the campaign trail as Vallas sought to warn that Johnson would be beholden to the teachers’ union if elected.
But how the next mayor will address the city’s most intractable issues remains to be seen. Both candidates watered down their most aggressive messaging on crime since entering the mayor’s race as pressure mounted during the runoff for Vallas address past associations with Republicans as well as a prolific social media presence where he said police are “handcuffed” by reform policies, and for Johnson to reckon with past support for the “defund the police” movement.
But Vallas recently clarified at a debate that “proactive policing is not taking the handcuffs off,” and that he would be focused on restoring beat officers and building trust with the community. Likewise, Johnson vowed last week not to decrease the department budget by “one penny.”
The next mayor will preside over a Chicago police force with 1,500 vacancies and be tasked with implementing the ongoing federal consent decree that is supposed to overhaul department policies and practices as well as, in a few years, execute a new police contract.
He also will appoint the next permanent Chicago police superintendent, after David Brown packed his bags and returned to Dallas shortly following Lightfoot’s loss.
On police staffing, Vallas has repeatedly claimed that “hundreds” of retired officers would return after he’s elected mayor, and hundreds more who transferred departments would fasten the Chicago police badge back on, too. But he has not provided concrete evidence besides promising that his proposed policy to maintain their seniority would sway them.
Meanwhile, Johnson affirmed he would promote current officers to increase the number of detectives by 200 and eliminate $150 million in what he described as wasteful spending and funnel that money toward more effective resources within the police department.
On taxes, Vallas pledged to grant relief by capping property tax levies on an individual basis, while Johnson has stated point-blank that he would not raise them. Both have raised eyebrows, as roughly $1.4 billion of the city’s 2023 property tax levy was used for pension debts, and halting those hikes would force the next mayor to find money elsewhere to pay for their programs.
Johnson also pitched a bundle of tax hikes and new levies. They include implementing a head tax on Chicago employers, a levy on financial transactions and a jet fuel tax as well as raising the levies on hotels and real estate sales of properties above $1 million. Some of these would require a change of state law.
Vallas, on the other hand, has talked about investing in the South and West sides by creating an “independent community development authority” that would be in charge of doling out city funds and directing city agencies to spur local economic growth.
The subject of education’s future in Chicago is more nebulous, though just as consequential.
The next mayor will preside over the school district’s last years of mayoral control — an era that began with Vallas at the helm of CPS — following the passage of a new law setting the stage for a 21-member elected school board by 2027, over Lightfoot’s objections.
Among the tasks either Vallas or Johnson will have to take on are entering into contract negotiations with the teachers union, whose current deal expires in 2024; coping with enrollment loss as a moratorium on school closings ends; and preparing for the elected school board transition.
Vallas, who has described school choice as the “civil rights issue for our generation,” opened the first charter schools in the district but has lately indicated he will not attempt to lift the CPS’ current cap on charters. As recently as 2022, however, he was advocating for more.
Johnson has pledged to fight to increase state funding to CPS and to shift from an enrollment-based to a needs-based model for determining how much each school gets. Though he has waffled when it comes to specifics on education, one thing is certain: Johnson would no longer be a member of the CTU come Inauguration Day, he has promised.
Asked last week to define the first issue they’d each fix in office, Vallas’ answer was one that anyone could have predicted from the start of his mayoral campaign: “Public safety,” he immediately replied.
Johnson, on the other hand, did not speak of crime, education or taxes.
“The first thing that I would fix: I want to restore confidence in government and the office of the mayor,” Johnson said. “I want to fix that relationship.”
