SPRINGFIELD — Illinois lawmakers head into the busy back half of the spring legislative session seeking to quash signature parts of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s agenda, from his attempts to tax businesses based on their number of employees to his policy eliminating tipped wages.

For decades, Chicago mayors have fought uphill battles in the statehouse, but the efforts by some Democratic lawmakers to forestall Johnson are unusual.

Kent Redfield, a retired political science professor at the University of Illinois Springfield, described the pushback from the Illinois General Assembly and other local Democrats to a Chicago mayor as “stunning.”

While Johnson has had trouble navigating the statehouse — where wheeling and dealing is essential for outsiders like the first-term mayor to achieve their legislative goals — there’s no guarantee that any of the measures undercutting him will become law.

One lawmaker called the bills opposing Johnson’s agenda “petty,” though another, who is one of the mayor’s most outspoken critics, believes they are being put forth for good reason.

“What you find from lawmakers in Illinois is not being anti-Mayor Brandon Johnson’s agenda as much as we want to incentivize businesses to do business in Illinois,” said that critic, state Rep. Curtis Tarver, an assistant majority leader in the House and a Democrat from Chicago’s South Side. “Some of these policies have very strong unintended consequences.”

Attempts to prevent future head taxes and phase out subminimum wages for tipped workers are both backed by business groups.

Kennedy Bartley, Johnson’s chief of external affairs, didn’t speculate on what was driving the opposition, but denied any suggestion city lobbyists aren’t communicating with lawmakers. Her team is in “regular and deep” conversations with leadership in Springfield to ensure the city isn’t “cut off at the knees” in its attempts to raise progressive revenue and improve conditions for working people, Bartley said.

Redfield says this session’s resistance is a sign of both changing political dynamics — the withering of Chicago’s political machine has given mayors since Richard M. Daley less political control over the City Council and state legislators — and Johnson’s failure to “bring people on board” in a time of tight city and state budgets.

“If you don’t understand and you don’t respect the guardrails and the mechanics of the process, then you’re putting yourself in a bad situation,” Redfield said. “You’ve got to operate from positions of strength and all I see from Springfield is the mayor taking an awful lot of heat and pushback on doing some pretty basic things within the City Council that, you know, mayors named Daley didn’t have those problems.”

One bill advancing in the statehouse would prohibit a city or county in Illinois from imposing a tax on businesses calculated based on their number of employees — also known as a head tax. On March 19, the bill, which Tarver co-sponsored, passed 19-0 out of the Illinois House’s Revenue and Finance Committee that he also chairs.

Johnson proposed a head tax on businesses with more than 100 employees last fall as part of the 2026 budget, but aldermen rejected the idea, instead passing their own budget that did not include it.

Johnson’s predecessor, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, phased out the decades-old head tax in 2012, calling it “a job killer” and “the right thing to do for businesses big and small.”

Johnson’s first proposal to reinstate it would have charged $21 per month per employee.

After pushback from aldermen, the business community and Gov. JB Pritzker, Johnson repeatedly tweaked the proposal, but it was ultimately stripped from the budget by a coalition of aldermen and replaced with a raft of new — and in some cases unproven — revenue proposals. Johnson did not sign or veto that budget and has since suggested that midyear layoffs could come if those revenues underperform.

Even though the city’s proposal went nowhere, the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association pushed for the statewide ban on local governments imposing such a tax going forward.

The group’s president and CEO, Mark Denzler, said a head tax would scare off investment. “Certainly mayors and county officials and state leaders have to balance budgets every year but this is one thing from a policy (perspective), every city, every county … wants to grow jobs. And imposing a per-person tax essentially on the creation of jobs is anti-job creation.”

The Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, the Illinois Retail Merchants Association and the Illinois Hotel and Lodging Association all submitted committee witness slips in support of IMA’s bill. Local government leaders, including the Illinois Municipal League and the city of Chicago, opposed it.

Democratic state Rep. Anthony DeLuca, the main sponsor of the bill and a former mayor of Chicago Heights, echoed Denzler’s sentiment about a head tax being punitive and noted how unusual it is for him to sponsor legislation that preempts home rule authority.

“I work very closely with municipal government and believe in local control and want municipalities to have the power and the ability to make decisions for their community,” he said, but added, “we must have a pro-growth, a business-friendly atmosphere here in Illinois.”

Tarver, meanwhile, has previously criticized Johnson’s lobbying efforts in the General Assembly as “hodgepodge,” and said he was dismayed that no one from Johnson’s lobbying team testified against the bill, despite them opposing it.

“The reality is that if a bill is posted and you have opposition to it, I think there is a fiduciary duty in representing the city of Chicago to express the city’s position and its interests on the record,” Tarver said.

Asked why the city didn’t testify, Bartley said “point well taken,” but noted “it isn’t a secret what our advocacy is centered around, it’s progressive revenue like the … head tax.”

“We are in favor of ensuring that the city of Chicago and other municipalities have the authority to make bold, courageous decisions legislatively as it relates to raising revenue, even when the state is not in a position to,” Bartley said. That includes online sports betting, the head tax and a long-standing push to get more income tax dollars from the state.

“Of course you can always find folks who may not have gotten a call before talking to a reporter or got a call and didn’t pick up the phone and can truthfully say they haven’t heard from us, right?” Bartley said, predicting the city’s “dogged” efforts “will most certainly be felt.”

In spite of its passage in committee, several House members were on the fence about whether they’d approve the head tax ban if it were called to a vote before the full House.

State Rep. Edgar González Jr., a Chicago Democrat who sits on the Revenue and Finance Committee, supported the bill during the hearing, and said, “once you get stuff out of committee, it percolates, conversations happen.” But if it were to reach the House floor, he was noncommittal.

“This is one of just, like, a bunch of bills that I think have just been taking shots at the mayor,” Gonzalez said. “There comes a point where there’s so many of them that it just comes off as petty rather than actually good policy. Until people can actually figure that out, I think that the debate around this is just going to be completely muddled.”

But he agreed with Tarver that the state should step in on issues as it sees fit.

Gonzalez said Johnson’s team has shown a “lack of relationship building” in Springfield and might have an “overreliance” on state lawmakers from Chicago, thinking they’ll automatically be supportive of the mayor’s agenda.

“That would be helpful if there was a concrete conversation about what the agenda would look like,” he said.

Another lawmaker, Democratic state Rep. Will Guzzardi of Chicago’s Northwest Side, also voted the bill out of committee, but said he doesn’t support it in its current form.

“My personal belief is that at this time of historic tax cuts for very wealthy individuals and huge corporations, as the federal government slashes our budgets here at the state and for local governments too, we can’t shut off any tools for states and local governments to use to ask the biggest corporations to pay what they owe in taxes to fund basic services,” Guzzardi said.

Another bill in the House would deny home rule authorities like Chicago the power to tax sports betting. Johnson included a 10.25% tax on net revenues from online sports betting in the city budget the council passed, which his team estimated would net about $26 million for 2026. Sports betting companies have challenged its constitutionality in court.

The Illinois House bill’s main sponsor is state Rep. Daniel Didech of Buffalo Grove, who heads the House Gaming Committee. He’s joined by more than 30 other Democratic co-sponsors, including Tarver, plus Republican state Reps. Brad Stephens of Rosemont, Jeff Keicher of Sycamore and John Cabello of Machesney Park.

Didech said without the state getting involved, players would be subjected to “potentially more unfair and predatory” treatment and they could get pushed off the legal regulated sportsbooks into the unregulated online websites.

“We didn’t realize that municipalities were considering this until it got proposed in the city of Chicago. If we realized that sooner, we would have or I would have started working on this sooner,” he said. “We realized that the door may have been opened to a really, really serious public policy problem that we wanted to try to close.”

When the bill passed 15-0 through the House Gaming Committee in February, Johnson’s chief statehouse lobbyist, John Arena, was among the opponents, but neither he nor anyone representing the mayor testified. Like Tarver and Gonzalez, Didech criticized the mayor’s lobbying efforts in Springfield.

“When we have a major stakeholder, like the city of Chicago, whose engagement with the legislature is inconsistent and unpredictable and sometimes completely absent, it very meaningfully inhibits our ability even to pass prudent public policy,” Didech said.

Bartley said she hoped that a phone call to specific legislators from her team “isn’t the thing standing in the way of them standing for working people.”

“If the problem here is that they haven’t heard from the city and that is why they are in opposition to the head tax or online sports betting being within the authority of the city, or anything else, I will personally give them a call,” she said.

“I am a lot less concerned with the criticisms of process, while I humbly receive them and will work to tighten that scope of the work,” Bartley continued. “I am much more interested in the criticism of the substance of what it is that we’re fighting for.”

In the House Labor and Commerce Committee last month, Tarver presented another bill he’s sponsoring with four other Democratic lawmakers that would tap the state instead of municipalities to oversee the regulation of tipped wages for workers. The hearing happened the same day Johnson vetoed an effort by Chicago aldermen to repeal the 2023 “One Fair Wage” ordinance, which gradually eliminates the city’s subminimum wage for tipped workers.

Aldermen last month voted 30-18 to freeze the ordinance’s implementation, citing rampant concerns from restaurant owners that the hikes were harming their businesses. The original ordinance was among Johnson’s earliest political wins after taking office in May 2023.

In Springfield, Sam Toia, president of the Illinois Restaurant Association, testified in the House committee that the Tarver bill is “about consistency, predictability and job creation.” The bill ended up passing through the committee by a 22-4 vote.

“It guarantees that every worker earns at least the full minimum wage while allowing tips to remain an important part of income for servers, bartenders and support staff,” Toia said. “When local governments regulate the tip credit differently from the rest of the state, it puts workers, shifts and even jobs at risk.”

Among those testifying in opposition to the bill was Arena, who echoed Johnson’s rationale by calling the subminimum wage “a lasting vestige of slavery, which has for generations been used as a means to suppress wages, while subjecting workers to higher rates of wage theft from employers and harassment by customers.”

He noted the majority of tipped workers in Chicago are Black and Hispanic women who live on the city’s South and West sides and that under Johnson’s “One Fair Wage” ordinance, those workers are guaranteed fair compensation, even when business is slow or when customers fail to tip.

“Mayor Johnson is committed to protecting the peace of mind and stability which has been granted to tipped workers through this ordinance and continues to stand shoulder to shoulder with hardworking Chicagoans as they seek dignity, security and opportunity in the workplace,” Arena said.

Tarver, who is Black, took exception to Arena comparing tipped wages to slavery, a comparison that Johnson, who is also Black, has also made in the past.

“He does not get to talk about the vestiges of slavery, because if we talk about that, we’re probably talking about what position his family was in versus mine,” Tarver said of Arena. Tarver went on to criticize Arena’s lobbying efforts, pointing to how his team didn’t testify against the head tax and sports betting bills despite the city’s opposition to them, only for those measures to sail through committees.

While two of those three bills from Illinois lawmakers would cut off new or expanded budget gap fillers for the city, Pritzker’s latest budget proposal would also essentially reduce another. His proposal would hold flat a consistent source of revenue, Local Government Distributive Funds — a slice of state income taxes doled out to municipalities.

That amounts to a cut, the Illinois Municipal League noted, bringing the local portion of total state income tax receipts from 6.47% down to 6.23%. Before 2011, the municipal portion was 10%.

The LGDF reduction was a trim in an already-tight budget and not directed at Johnson specifically. But it is the opposite of what Johnson has called for since his address to the General Assembly a few years ago, when he implored the state to increase the payment level. He has repeatedly cited more LGDF funding as part of his preferred city budget solutions since then.

The LGDF proposal comes on top of Pritzker’s approval of a recent sweetener that added billions to Chicago’s long-term pension liability, and elimination of the state’s grocery tax. The city did not adopt its own grocery tax to replace it, blowing a roughly $80 million hole in its budget.

In the immediate term, the pension bill was projected to add $60 million in costs to the 2027 budget. Johnson’s finance team opposed it as the latest unfunded mandate state legislators had pushed onto Chicago’s ledger. While he said his team advocated for attaching a new revenue provision to it, the mayor did not secure one.

Speaking last summer about the pension sweetener, Johnson said he simply didn’t have the power to change lawmakers’ minds. “It just didn’t quite matter” to them when “those votes were there when I was sworn in two years ago.”

Quig reported from Chicago.