Toni Preckwinkle sees tough times ahead for Chicago’s new mayor

She missed a chance to make history in Chicago’s mayoral race. Now Toni Preckwinkle says she is bringing Cook County an “historic” budget.

“What’s historic about a county budget?” I asked the history teacher-turned-Cook County Board president over breakfast last week.

She touted her fiscal year 2020 budget forecast, which projects a “historically small” budget gap of $18.7 million.

Since taking office in 2010, “we consistently tried to make structural changes rather than just ‘one-off’ stuff,” Preckwinkle said. “And except for the year in which the soda tax got repealed, we’ve seen a steady decline in the gap that we had to close as a result of the structural changes that we made.”

Preckwinkle vied to become Chicago’s first black female mayor in the recent citywide elections. She lost, badly, to Lori Lightfoot.

But Preckwinkle still has her day jobs — running county government and the Cook County Democratic Party.

She projects the lowest budget shortfall since she took office and faced a $487 million deficit. And she pledges to balance her next budget with no new taxes.

Taxes are Preckwinkle’s third rail. In 2010, she defeated her predecessor, Todd Stroger, by pledging to cut the county’s sales tax. In 2015, she was forced to raise that tax to stabilize the county’s finances.

In 2017, she won the nickname “Toni Taxwinkle” during the disastrous rollout of her infamous soda tax.

The 2015 sales tax hike was a “difficult decision” that she pushed through the county board on a 9-8 vote, she recalled. But the resulting revenues also enabled her to “put, I think initially, 90 percent of the money, and it’s now 70 percent, into our pension. So we put more than a billion dollars in since 2016.”

Now, she said, “we’re in the best shape of anybody in the city, the state, most municipalities.”

Including a certain city budget, managed by a certain Chicago mayor.

During the mayoral campaign, “the discussion was that the (city’s) budget deficit was like half a billion,” Preckwinkle recalled. “But, you know, the more recent numbers I’ve heard are closer to 1.4 billion.”

That means Lightfoot has “some very difficult decisions to make, and it’s unclear where additional resources are gonna come from,” Preckwinkle said. And there’s “the ramp up in pension payments, that are “$270, $280 million this year and next, alone.”

So, I asked, why did you want that job?

When she took the county job, she said, “I thought, I’m going to have to do some really terrible things” to right the financial ship. “And I may not get reelected.”

But, she thought, “OK, I’ll do what I have to do. And hopefully, the county’s on a better footing, and if that cost me the job, that’s OK.”

Then, her trademark giggle. “You know, I feel the same thing about the city. You’re going to have to make some very difficult decisions, and it may preclude the opportunity to be reelected.”

Preckwinkle was, as ever, disciplined as she talked numbers over her “usual” breakfast. A slice of raisin toast and hot tea.

So, I asked, what’s your working relationship like with Lightfoot?

They met for lunch, she replied. And Preckwinkle hopes to work with the new mayor on shared concerns like violence prevention and economic development.

Can you comment on how the mayor is doing so far?

“No.”

I asked again.

“No.”

One more time.

“I think it’s a really tough job.”

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