CHICAGO (WLS) — The pushback continues to pile up against Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposed corporate head tax in his city budget proposal.
Now, another leading business group is sounding the alarm and the restaurant industry is also expressing concerns.
Mayor Johnson touted the head tax as a corporate investment in public safety. But the pressure is now ramping up on City Hall to reject it and find the revenue or savings somewhere else.
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Lunchtime in the West Loop was bustling with foot traffic on Wednesday, a good sign for downtown restaurants and businesses.
“Downtown Loop right now is quite vibrant, and it’s getting better every day,” said Scott Weiner, co-owner of the Fifty/50 Restaurant Group.
However, with the mayor looking to serve up a corporate head tax of $21 dollars per month for every employee who works in a city office half of the time, the downtown recovery may take another hit.
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“So how many companies are going to tell their employees come to the office two days, work from home three days, and then they can bypass the head tax in general?” Weiner said. “And we all know hybrid work is part of what’s destroying downtown’s vibrancy. We need people back at work.”
A new report by the Federal Reserve paints a bleak hiring outlook for Chicago over the next 12 months. The Fed is projecting hiring to be down 39.75%. That the lowest it’s been since March of 2020 during the pandemic, when it was down 47.8%.
The Civic Committee is calling the head tax a hostile move against business.
“You don’t put in a policy that will hurt growth, that will hurt the tax base and potentially shrink the tax base, that will compromise the vibrancy of the city, in order to solve this other problem,” Civic Committee President Derek Douglas said. “It’s like you’re trying to solve a problem by creating an additional problem.”
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While the mayor said the head tax would only impact three percent of businesses, the Civic Committee and some alders say that’s misleading.
“The number that we should be focused on is, what percentage of the jobs in Chicago is he taxing, not the percentage of the companies that are getting taxed,” Douglas said. “And the reality is, he’s taxing a humongous share of the jobs in the City of Chicago.”
Alders have also expressed concerns about other aspects of the mayor’s nearly $17 billion budget, suggesting the wrangling over revenue and spending could drag on until close to the end of the year.
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