Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration enters new year with city at crossroads on migrants, other issues

On Mayor Brandon Johnson’s first full day in office, he visited ground zero of the crisis that would come to define his next seven months.

Striding into the 12th District Chicago police station on the Near West Side in May, the new chief executive clasped his hands before his waist as he surveyed a lobby floor cluttered with sleeping bags and families of bleary-eyed migrants.

“How do you like Chicago so far?” Johnson asked a woman and boy, with political ally and local Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez, 25th, translating in Spanish.

As an aide implored TV news crews to step back, the mayor continued: “As a city, we’re going to do everything we can to make this place, your opportunities, more comfortable.”

[ Mayor Brandon Johnson offers empathy but no immediate solutions as he visits migrant shelters ]

Now heading into a new year, many Chicagoans are judging the mayor’s performance so far based on how they think he has handled that early promise of clearing out the police stations and humanely resettling asylum-seekers, many of whom arrive impoverished from Venezuela.

The singular issue has threatened to eclipse Johnson’s broader agenda, though he points to recent City Council wins on labor requirements and more as evidence he’s living up to his leftist bona fides.

Johnson is the most progressive mayor now leading a major American city, and his victory was seen as an electoral mandate for his prescription of bold investments for the working class while leading with compassion.

But the desperation of the migrant crisis that awaited him in May rose to unfathomable heights this fall, testing the limits of the mayor’s mantra that Chicago has “enough” for everyone as thousands of migrants slept on police station floors, at the city’s airports and on sidewalks.

Indeed, just last week Johnson’s team moved to free up $95 million in COVID-19 stimulus funds to cover the ongoing costs of housing and helping feed asylum-seekers. And the mayor has acknowledged the $150 million allocated in the city budget for next year’s migrant services will surely fall short without help from the state and federal governments.

In an interview, mayoral senior adviser Jason Lee acknowledged the challenges but said the administration has proved it can balance those dynamics while advancing “one of the more progressive agendas in recent municipal history.”

Lee highlighted Johnson’s oft-stated goal to run the city in a collaborative way that doesn’t push some groups ahead while leaving others behind.

“The mayor has a vision for transforming the city and doing it in an inclusive way where someone winning doesn’t mean someone else losing, and that remains the goal,” Lee said. “I think we’ve been able to strike the right balance of some real impactful policy that doesn’t polarize.”

[ What to know about Chicago’s migrant crisis ]

But Chicago is a notoriously divided city, with a long history of ethnic groups asserting their own power at the expense of the clout wielded by others. And all the way from Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott fanned the flames further when he sent the first bus of asylum-seekers to Chicago in August 2022 as a rebuke of liberal cities that support open borders.

Since then, more than 26,400 migrants have come to Chicago, with some critics upset the city hasn’t done more to accommodate them and others angry at what they say is a policy that puts the new arrivals ahead of the need to address decades of disinvestment in struggling neighborhoods.

Aldermen and other political leaders who spoke with the Tribune largely split along ideological lines over how they would assess the new administration.

Johnson’s strongest allies said he is being judged unfairly due to the chasm between the political establishment and the grassroots and labor coalition where Johnson rose up as a Chicago Teachers Union organizer. Others warned that Johnson isn’t prepared to handle the decisions Chicago’s mayor faces, and said the past seven months are a harbinger of more struggles.

Pressure on migrant response

Johnson has weathered criticism he lacks a robust plan on how to grapple with the logistics and exorbitant costs of the migrants, and that his administration has not been transparent, as promised. And he has been publicly second-guessed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker and other officials, further underscoring perceived problems with the city’s approach.

But Lee said beliefs that the city has not formed a robust migrant response plan are based on “misconceptions” of “what is a plan” when it comes to a dynamic situation like Chicago’s.

[ Asylum-seekers cleared from once-crowded Chicago police station as city begins to enact new policies ]

The administration has highlighted that the city’s shelter system swelled under Johnson to 27 citywide sites and that he “inherited” costly contracts from predecessor Lori Lightfoot but has since negotiated rates down. By mid-December, Johnson’s team also heralded that migrants weren’t sleeping at police stations anymore.

That feat came on the heels of the city’s botched proposal to house about 2,000 migrants at a tent encampment in Brighton Park, which rankled local Ald. Julia Ramirez, 12th, and others who complained the city was not communicating with them and that the former industrial land could be contaminated.

Those concerns came to a head when Johnson’s team announced the site was safe for temporary living, only for Pritzker to counter days later that his administration found the city contractor’s environmental assessment was heavily flawed and possibly missed harmful amounts of contaminants. In a striking rebuke, Pritzker refused to use state money to pay for the encampment, effectively shelving the idea.

The governor would shrug off the discord two days later, instead blaming reporters for trying to “stoke that conversation of differences.” Johnson, meanwhile, avoided holding a press availability until the next week.

Restricting media access is a natural reaction when “everybody is underwater,” but it is hurting the mayor, veteran Chicago political strategist Delmarie Cobb said.

“The administration needs to be more transparent. That is one of the hallmarks of being a progressive,” Cobb said. “Then you get in there, you get hit with 50 things at once … and the things that you said you were going to do in terms of communicate, and transparency and all of that, suddenly you’re so inundated, I believe, that people begin to retreat.”

[ Gov. J.B. Pritzker won’t proceed with Brighton Park migrant camp, citing ‘serious’ environmental concerns ]

Lee, however, described the Brighton Park situation as the result of “different perspectives” with the state.

“We made every good faith effort to get that site ready to go. We followed a remediation program that we still stand by,” Lee said. “We never made any claims about permanent residential use, because that’s not what the site was ever intended for.”

Ald. Scott Waguespack, 32nd, said Johnson’s most egregious stumbles over the migrant response boil down to that lack of transparency. He said the administration has dodged questions on matters ranging from fiscal management, including city payments to Favorite Healthcare Staffing — a national employment firm hired to run migrant shelters — to concerns about a shelter in Waguespack’s North Side ward.

“It’s just getting to the point where people are feeling that they are holding themselves above accountability, and above transparency, and this whole rhetoric of ‘for the people’ is just a one giant charade,” Waguespack said. “I have never seen so many missteps, mistakes and just this dishonest lack of transparency.”

Building a Cabinet, and a story

The Johnson administration has struggled with critical personnel hires, making it harder to run city government and put his policy goals into effect. Johnson didn’t hire a corporation counsel, the city’s top lawyer, until after nearly a month in office. He didn’t choose a new leader for Intergovernmental Affairs until late November — and relied on a Lightfoot holdover who was not part of his inner circle to hold the position working with aldermen and other officials to forward his agenda.

The mayor fired Allison Arwady as public health commissioner but did not replace her with a noninterim commissioner for months.

More than six months after Johnson took office, he does not have a communications director, which means the administration often struggles to project or deliver a coherent message about its plans. The lack of staffing has put an increased burden on the people Johnson relies on, and critics argue the administration has too few key figures making decisions.

[ Mayor Brandon Johnson fires health Commissioner Allison Arwady day after health board asks him to keep her in her post ]

Eric Adelstein, a political strategist based in Chicago, said Johnson conveyed a clear message on the campaign trail. Adelstein is less sure what story Johnson wants to tell as mayor.

“The problem for many mayors is that perception becomes reality, and I think right now, whether it’s fair or unfair, the perception is that things are moving very slowly,” Adelstein said. “When you don’t articulate a compelling vision of the future of where you want to go, it creates a certain level of uncertainty.”

Kennedy Bartley, executive director of the United Working Families political organization, which backed Johnson’s mayoral candidacy, said that expectations are higher for Johnson because he is not a “status quo” mayor.

Bartley noted that a decade after previous mayors closed city mental health clinics, Johnson’s recently passed $16.77 billion budget calls for adding two mental health clinic pilots, yet some people ask her if that’s enough.

“We’ve been fighting against them closing, and now we’re in a conversation about them opening, but the rubric is different,” Bartley said. “It’s a welcome challenge, but it is a challenge nonetheless.”

Bartley said she too has unfulfilled demands not yet addressed, such as canceling the city’s contract with gunfire detection company ShotSpotter and divesting from the Chicago Police Department budget. But that requires organizers like her to fight to make the idea “more politically possible” for Johnson, she said.

“What we used to judge administrations on, it was the status quo, to work to keep Realtors and cops happy,” Bartley said. “Now we have a mayor that we judge based on his stated values.”

Progressive values

A chuckle tumbled out of CTU President Stacy Davis Gates as she remembered her view of the fifth floor of City Hall under Lightfoot. “Not only was I not invited, I was barred,” she said, referencing how security stopped her from getting off the elevator outside the mayor’s suite of offices during the 2019 teacher strike.

One election later, the scene couldn’t be more different.

Following Johnson’s inauguration, Davis Gates returned to the fifth floor, with an invite to the signing of his executive order establishing a deputy mayor of labor relations. This time, security focused on guarding Johnson rather than hassling Davis Gates.

“What surrounded me were people who struggled to be heard over time for generations, smiling with the mayor of Chicago,” Davis Gates said about the room of labor organizers. “I remember the smiles. I remember the elation. The energy was unparalleled.”

Months later, Davis Gates points to the cascading wins from the City Council this fall: abolishing subminimum wage for service workers; establishing one of the most expansive paid leave requirements in the nation; passing a referendum question asking voters whether to raise taxes on certain real estate sales to combat homelessness; and putting a host of investments into addressing the “root causes” of violence in his budget.

“I ain’t seeing no losses,” Davis Gates said.

But another seasoned figure of the left, Ald. Jeanette Taylor, 20th, carries a far less rosy outlook, she revealed in a December episode of “The Ben Joravsky Show” podcast.

Taylor pointed to allegations by aldermen that Johnson’s now-former floor leader, Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, bullied and threatened them in an effort to block unfavorable legislation as evidence that progressives aren’t prepared to lead.

The November incident, which led to the council deadlocking in a censure vote against Ramirez-Rosa and Johnson casting the tiebreaker to bail him out, suggests some progressives have become more concerned with power than organizing.

“We cannot say that we are the movement people, we are the left, and we do the same exact thing that the right is doing,” Taylor said.

“We should not be on the fifth floor, and I’m speaking my whole heart,” Taylor said. “We were not ready, because we haven’t been in government long enough to know how government really runs. … And we look real stupid right now.”

[ Mayor Brandon Johnson saves City Council ally from official rebuke for bullying, threats ]

Reached for comment, Ramirez-Rosa, 35th, did not react to Taylor’s remarks because, he said, “as a rule, I try to not engage in a back-and-forth with people who are part of our progressive movement in the media. I will say that I’ve always sought to push along a progressive agenda. … I made mistakes. I have taken responsibility for those mistakes.”

But for a truly democratic movement, Davis Gates said, infighting is exactly how grassroots movements grow stronger.

“Progressives disagree on everything, actually. That’s kind of a feature of our movement,” Davis Gates said. “Brothers and sisters and siblings, we fight all the time, and sometimes you see it in the front yard, right, and sometimes it’s at the kitchen table.”

New era of City Council

Johnson took office as the City Council continues to change.

The body is more racially diverse and more liberal than during prior generations. But it also has more risk of becoming mired in disagreement than past rubber-stamp bodies. The council’s bloc of independent aldermen grew under Emanuel, and that trend accelerated during the Lightfoot years.

“Our ideological divide is so wide … probably as widest that I’ve ever seen in my tenure and probably in the council’s history,” said veteran Ald. Jason Ervin, 28th, Johnson’s hand-picked Budget Committee chair. “We got everybody from almost Blue Dog Democrats to ultraprogressive, socialist, all under the same party banner. So I think that’s where the tension primarily comes from.”

Ald. Brian Hopkins, 2nd, agreed, saying that makeup “speaks to the legitimate differences of opinion regarding policy.”

“Nobody really has a solid 26-vote majority, so everything has to be sort of cobbled together, and you do see unlikely alliances that form around a single issue,” Hopkins said.

To that end, the mayor’s early olive branch extension of some leadership appointments to supporters of his runoff opponent, Paul Vallas, and subsequent efforts to forge relationships could pay off when a more painful piece of legislation could use support outside his base.

But Johnson’s demeanor has not veered much from his first council meetings, either. He continues standing for the duration of the session and keeping a cool head in the face of flare-ups.

And his penchant for the occasional joke or line of flattery remains strong. After a recent council meeting adjourned, the mayor presented a CD of an apparent old rap mixtape produced by his vice mayor, Ald. Walter Burnett, 27th, as someone played the audio softly from the chamber speakers to tease him.

[ Chicago City Council approves Mayor Brandon Johnson’s first budget ]

The mayor’s budget soared through in a 41-8 vote this fall. That easy win signals he can successfully reach across the aisle and build strong majorities for his major initiatives. But it also reflects the fact the spending plan lacked any painful choices, for better or worse.

Closing a projected $538 million budget gap next year entailed Johnson taking a record sum from tax increment financing funds — a tactic previous mayors have used that has been controversial because it is a one-time fix.

“They took the path of least resistance this year, but some of that will certainly come at the expense of next year, which is interesting,” Hopkins, who voted yes for the budget, said. “There’s only so many TIFs you can sweep with a broom, and that dries up too. So some of the one-off tricks that were used to balance this budget won’t be available.”

And there are rumbles of broader philosophical concerns.

Brad Tietz, the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce’s vice president for government relations and strategy, said the business community is miffed over how the regular cadence of weekly or biweekly calls from previous administrations has stopped. He also said the administration does not appear to share a focus on the business community and for economic development that other mayors had.

“There’s something missing between the business community and the administration,” Tietz said, adding that previous mayors struck a balance “between jobs and worker protections. What we’re seeing now is an administration beholden to an activist and labor base.”

Johnson, for his part, has dealt with the naysayers with his same laid-back, if not idealistic, message from the start.

At a recent holiday party for supporters of the Democratic National Convention coming to Chicago, Johnson nodded to the concerns with a quip suggesting he plans to be the city’s longest-serving mayor.

Johnson told the audience he’s only been in office for six months and needed their patience because he has 23 and a half years to go. He later echoed the sentiment at a holiday party with aldermen, declaring: “I look forward to the next 23 years and five months as mayor!”

The Tribune’s Gregory Royal Pratt, A.D. Quig and Dan Petrella contributed.

ayin@chicagotribune.com