To veto, or not to veto?

That is the question facing Mayor Brandon Johnson as an alternative budget plan from defiant aldermen marches toward a vote. And his public absence Wednesday spoke volumes.

The mayor’s office canceled an afternoon news conference less than an hour before it was supposed to start, citing “ongoing meetings and budget negotiations.” And he still has not made up his mind on a veto, possibly his only way to prevent opponents from using their current City Council majority to pass their plan, according to spokesperson Cassio Mendoza.

If Johnson caves on his earlier veto threats that would clear the path clear for aldermen to pass their plan without him.

“We’re still driving the process,” Ald. Scott Waguespack, a lead backer of the alternative plan, said Wednesday. “He’s moving full speed ahead without wanting to change the path that he’s on.”

Even as he stays quiet on the veto possibility, Johnson has tried to hold on to the moral and legislative high ground. The emboldened renegade bloc of council moderates say he is not negotiating with them, and as recently as Tuesday afternoon he characterized their spending package as a “Secret Budget” that was not only “immoral, it is simply not feasible.”

But underneath the rhetorical bombs being thrown on both sides was a mayor losing options with under two weeks to go before a government shutdown.

Ahead of a Wednesday Budget Committee hearing on the aldermen’s budget, many supporters of that package said they had not heard from him, despite his claims about ongoing talks.

Veteran Ald. Emma Mitts said no one from the mayor’s administration had called her for days, a sign, she said, that they were “giving up.”

“You can’t talk when you get on the phone anyway,” she added. “It’s all about their agenda.”

The final alternative package included plans to increase plastic bag taxes, sell around $1 billion in debt owed to the city, the legalization and taxation of video gambling machines across the city, liquor tax hikes and more.

Top Johnson finance officials blasted the aldermen’s proposal during the meeting, arguing many of the key items it relies on to close a late-stage budget gap will not bring in nearly as much money as aldermen predict.

While the aldermen say their revenue raisers would generate $176 million, Johnson officials said the plan would actually cost the city $8.3 million. Aldermen pushed back against the mayor’s office characterization of their plan.

Ald. Anthony Beale complained that “everything we have submitted has a red line through it,” while Ald. Brendan Reilly labeled the critical presentation a “dog-and-pony show.”

“I sort of feel like you’re hitting the budget over the head with a hammer,” said Ald. Pat Dowell, Johnson’s handpicked Finance Chair. “I stick with the numbers that we put on the table.”

Since Johnson officially kicked off his third budget fight in mid-October by introducing a $16.6 billion package that reinstates Chicago’s corporate head tax, he has found himself increasingly backed into a political corner.

Were the mayor to proceed with a veto, only to watch a supermajority of aldermen clear the 34-vote threshold to overrule him, he would suffer an astounding loss in his power struggle with the most antagonistic City Council that Chicago’s seen in decades.

His council foes sought to call his bluff earlier this week by revealing, then advancing their rival revenue package to the full council floor. Johnson had promised to veto any budget with a garbage fee hike, a component of the aldermen’s plan that they removed Monday.

Since then, Johnson has not directly answered when asked if he would nonetheless veto their budget, which does not include the head tax he has insisted be included. “We’re not at a point where I can make that assertion,” he said Monday.

While the process isn’t over yet, many in and around City Hall said the 2026 budget fight didn’t have to be this tough for the first-term mayor.

“Chicago’s budget challenges are hard and past mayors took a long, hard look at the chessboard before they made their move,” said Thomas Bowen, a Democratic strategist who advised Johnson’s predecessor, Lori Lightfoot. “This administration keeps shoving checker pieces up their noses.”

Johnson would be the first to say he “inherited” a host of issues when he entered the mayor’s office on the fifth floor. But he would get no mercy from opponents for a potential government shutdown — or for making things worse for his successors.

The dollars and dimes behind Johnson’s corporate head tax or the opposing aldermen’s bundle of liquor tax, plastic bag and Uber surcharge hikes and more made up much of the recent budget discussions. And by uttering a veto threat, Johnson has hardened the stances of the two sides.

Big mistake, according to Ald. Andre Vasquez, a frequent mayoral critic on the left. Johnson’s lack of negotiation pushed the council to this point, he said.

“It says something about the lack of confidence in the fifth floor that it has gotten to this point,” Vasquez, 40th, said.

The sticking point for several critical swing votes such as Vasquez is fiscal responsibility, which they say sets up future Chicagoans to inherit a better government than the one they are navigating. Despite the full court press from the Chicago Teachers Union, the mayor’s biggest ally, those aldermen say they’re nonplussed by the accusations they are siding with billionaires over the working class by not standing with Johnson’s proposal.

In the end, at least five progressives have avoided endorsing or outright criticized Johnson’s budget proposal: Vasquez, Matt Martin, Ruth Cruz, Desmon Yancy and Ronnie Mosley.

During Tuesday’s Finance Committee vote, Vasquez and Martin rejected the opposition’s revenue plan too, but that was more a sign they wanted to continue leveraging both sides.

Mosley sided with the aldermen after they dropped a controversial garbage fee hike. Cruz and Yancy are not on the Finance Committee but have previously said that they have fiscal concerns with the mayor’s plan.

Johnson’s proposal to nearly halve a previously planned $260 million advance pension payment and borrow money for police settlements and firefighter backpay is at the heart of those progressives’ concerns.

Vasquez, also the Progressive Caucus co-chair, said he has so far rejected both plans because their backers have failed to share data backing up their revenue assumptions.

He was skeptical of the aldermen’s proposal to raise $90 million by selling debt owed to the city. But he thinks the alternative group — and not the mayor — is more likely to listen to his issues and make changes to win him over.

“All they have done is talk about why they can’t do a thing, and then they wonder why you can’t get to a vote,” Vasquez said about the Johnson administration. “That’s the problem. They need to learn how to engage and negotiate.”

Meanwhile, Ald. Walt “Red” Burnett, a recent Johnson appointee who sits near the City Council’s ideological middle, also voted against the alternative budget Tuesday. He cited the plan to legalize video gambling machines to raise $6.8 million.

The move, likely to compel the operators of the future Bally’s Casino, which would be competing with thousands of slots-like machines in neighborhoods, to halt a voluntary annual $4 million payment to the city, is itself “a gamble,” Burnett said. He argued that it was “absurd” to expect those machines could be licensed and begin to bring in revenue within months, but the prospects of them cropping up on every corner would be intolerable.

“There were just things in there that I feel like are a bit half-baked, and getting that budget 15 minutes beforehand doesn’t make me feel comfortable,” Burnett, 27th, said of the alternative plan. “It’s kind of frustrating to have that done by one side of the coin, and then the other side continues to do the same thing.”

The newest member of City Council, who replaced his father after his July retirement, also represents the ward where Bally’s is located. But while the elder Burnett was one of Johnson’s biggest council allies as vice mayor, his son said he “can’t say” yet where he stands on his budget — another sign the mayor is fast losing ground on his sway over negotiations.

“If we can get the video gaming out of that budget, I can get a bit more comfortable,” Burnett said about the counterproposal.

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