Hot on the heels of the $163M in expected refunds for overcharging parking violators for a decade or more comes word of some more financial woes for fiscal wizard and teachers’ union tool, Chicago mayor Brandon ‘Bear of Little Brains’ Johnson.
At the beginning of August, the rotund billionaire bloviator governor of Illinois signed a bill that shoved an already dangerously teetering Chicago closer to the fiscal abyss.
…For all the growing chorus of voices screaming ‘stop spending money,’ the Bear is always scrambling for more to cover what he’s promised, or worse, what he owes. To be fair, the State of Illinois – groaning under the burden of its own gluttonous tax and spend porcine potentate, J.B. Pritzker – has only trapped the intellectually challenged city chief executive further in a box from which he cannot see an open flap for the cardboard.
Chicago’s finances were already on life support. Now, with a single piece of legislation, the state of Illinois has pushed the city closer to fiscal collapse—and put every American taxpayer at risk of footing the bill.
On August 1, Governor J. B. Pritzker signed a bill that ranks among the most financially reckless in Illinois history. It includes pension “sweeteners” for Chicago police and fire employees hired after 2011. Experts estimate that it creates $11 billion in new liabilities and drops the “funded ratio” of Chicago police and fire pensions to just 18 percent, meaning that they have just 18 cents on hand for every dollar owed. (Actuaries consider funded ratios below 40 percent as being at the point of no return.)
Chicago is already carrying more pension debt than 43 states, and, at the time of the governor’s generous swipe of the pen, the Bear was in the midst of an ongoing battle to force the school board to vote to pick up a $175-$200M payday load with their budget to take some of the heat off the city. He even wangled a last-minute board appointment to try to stack the deck to jam the measure through.
Astonishingly enough, seven school board members stood firm, managed to persuade five others to join them, and they passed a balanced Chicago Public Schools budget without the mayor’s high-interest payday loan included.
Dang. Brother Bear needed money badly.
Credit markets took note of Chicago’s dire straits. In January of 2025, Standard and Poor’s downgraded Chicago’s rating, which the Bear brushed off at the time. Here it is a year later, and things are so grim, it’s like déjà vu all over again, with Fitch this time.
Fitch Rates Chicago, IL’s $503M GOs Ser 2026A (Taxable) and Ser 2026B ‘BBB+’; Downgrades Outstanding
Fitch Ratings has assigned a ‘BBB+’ rating to the following general obligation (GO) bonds to be issued by the city of Chicago, Illinois:
–$487,515,000 GO bonds, taxable series 2026A;
–$15,480,000 GO bonds, series 2026B.
And they don’t like what they see in the future.
…The Rating Outlook remains Negative on Chicago’s IDR, GO bonds and STSC sales tax securitization bonds (senior lien). The Outlook on the STSC second lien sales tax securitization bonds is Stable.
This downward slide means that when Johnson can get his hands on some cha-ching, it’s going to cost everyone in the city more money.
…In a statement, Fitch said the downgrade is due to disagreements between the Johnson administration and the City Council, adding that the disagreements have “impeded decision timeliness and the development of a credible and comprehensive plan to restore structural balance.”
In response to the city’s credit rating downgrade, Civic Federation President Joe Ferguson released the following statement: “The Civic Federation takes no pleasure in yesterday’s news that two rating agencies have downgraded the City’s credit rating. A credit downgrade is not just symbolic; it indicates real financial consequences and long-term ramifications for not just the City but its residents.”
Then it turned out it wasn’t only Fitch giving Chicago the stink eye, and those first responder pension sweeteners turned out to be a good part of it. None of this has stopped the Bear’s puppet masters, the Chicago Teachers’ Union (CTU), from heading to the state capital to ask for more of their own goodies.
NEW: Two ratings agencies hit Chicago with credit downgrades today.
Why?
One major reason: The $11B in pension sweeteners signed into law by Gov. JB Pritzker following token opposition from Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration last year.
I predicted this would… https://t.co/ykQm3mnKum pic.twitter.com/CyJhgSEsST
— Austin Berg (@Austin__Berg) February 26, 2026
…One major reason: The $11B in pension sweeteners signed into law by Gov. JB Pritzker following token opposition from Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration last year.
I predicted this would trigger a downgrade when Pritzker signed the bill.
Yet the Chicago Teachers Union and others are in Springfield right now lobbying for further pension sweeteners.
Our political leaders are selling out the city’s future in exchange for political support from government unions.
This has to stop.
It’s not going to stop. The Chicago Tribune just caught wind of a backroom secret deal the Bear of Little Brains was working on for a $500M bond issue.
Yeah, and? Cities do that all the time, right?
Editorial: Mayor Brandon Johnson is leaving his successors with a financial ash heap. It’s worse than we thought. https://t.co/WWuf3z9SpI
— Chicago Tribune Opinion (@chitribopinions) February 27, 2026
Not like this, they don’t.
For starters, Johnson was going to look for investors to ante the money up front, so that the city wouldn’t start paying back for three full years. Not interest-only payments, not a dime for the first three years.
The amount is more than the city needs, because they plan to use the excess to pay interest when they start making payments.
And pinkie swear, every dime of that extra $49M will still be sitting in the bank three years from whenever they get it. Sacrosanct. No one touches it…sitting there…glistening all green and luscious…promise! Sure, it will.
And because of what Johnson wanted to use the money for, these were going to be taxable bonds, with the whole mess left for an incoming administration like a fiscal IED under the new mayor’s desk.
…Wednesday’s downgrades come as the city prepares to solicit bond investors next month for close to $500 million to cover back pay owed to firefighters due to a lengthy contract negotiation and hundreds of millions in anticipated costs to settle lawsuits, most of which pertain to alleged police misconduct. The downgrades will make the debt more expensive for the city, as investors will be expected to demand higher yields in response to the higher risk tied to Chicago’s precarious financial condition.
But here’s the real shocker: The city is structuring this debt so it doesn’t have to make payments for the next three-plus years, extending the time frame for paying off the bonds and making the entire enterprise considerably more expensive than was envisioned during the fraught budget discussions late last year.
Before the downgrades, these bonds already were problematic.
…The cost of the firefighter pay and the settlements together totals about $449 million. But the city is seeking to issue $488 million in bonds for that purpose.
Hmm, we wondered. Why such a difference?
As it turns out, the Johnson administration wants to keep the cash-strapped city from having to make payments on these bonds for another three years. The extra amount the city is borrowing would go largely toward making interest payments on the debt through 2029.
In describing the arrangement to us, Fitch actually used the dreaded municipal-bond financing term, “scoop and toss.” As in the frowned-upon practice of refinancing existing debt and extending it into the future, thereby raising the total cost of whatever costs that initial debt was covering in the first place — a method Chicago mayors largely have eschewed since Richard M. Daley retired.
This is a completeblack money hole.
Oh. And retire them in ten years instead of five.
…Fitch now tells us it’s the agency’s understanding the city will retire the bonds within a decade, not the five years originally envisioned. Adding insult to injury, the city will need to float taxable bonds rather than the tax-free bonds municipalities ordinarily issue because of how it’s using the money. That also will hike the city’s interest rate substantially because investors require far higher yields if they’re paying taxes on their interest income.
We don’t know as of now how much more the total interest costs will be, but no doubt they’ll be considerably higher than $58 million. All to pay for $449 million in operational costs that should have been managed within the city’s budget. We asked the mayor’s office about all of this, but they were unable to comment by press time.
Imagine that – the mayor’s office had ‘no comment.’
Let’s be honest: nothing would be more authentically Chicago than this. https://t.co/FRZtoOIZQx
— Aaron M. Renn 🇺🇸 (@aaron_renn) February 27, 2026
You know, that stinkhole is going to collapse in on itself.
In the meantime, as those first cracks in the earth around Chicago get wider and the groans louder and more ominous, where’s our Bear of Little Brains?
Oh.
He was in Washington, D.C., lecturing the other wildlife in the Democratic Party.
Yesterday, @ChicagosMayor flew to Washington D.C. — on the taxpayer dime — to deliver a rebuttal to the SOTU.
Many of the audience members to whom Johnson delivered his remarks were dressed as frogs.
Brandon Johnson is not to be taken seriously. https://t.co/CjM0QyGB6K pic.twitter.com/feYa9A0qn0
— Chicago Contrarian (@ChicagoContrar1) February 25, 2026
TYRANNY IS A VIRUS – I AM HERE TO PROTECT THE SOUL OF AMERICA
Yes it looks like a left-wing Muppet Show but here’s what Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said in his rebuttal of @realDonaldTrump last night in Washington D.C:
“Tyranny is a virus and we cannot allow it to take root because Trump’s war is a war on all of us….I’ve said that if f… https://t.co/aPSqi9qmNg pic.twitter.com/FZU7kxSSBP
— Reporter William J. Kelly #thatreporter (@Williamjkelly) February 25, 2026
He’s the mayor of Crazytown and thinks all the world is his stage.
One of those frogs could be substituted for him at any point, and it couldn’t be any worse, even if anyone noticed.
It might even work out better.
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