Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias vowed Thursday to hold the line on property taxes if elected Chicago mayor, saying instead the path to righting the city’s fiscal ship goes through Springfield.

In a 30-minute interview with the Tribune, the latest — and most well-funded — candidate gunning for Mayor Brandon Johnson’s seat next year responded to a question on whether hiking property taxes was on the table with a flat “No.”

He also said he would not implement the automatic property tax increase tied to inflation left by former Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

“Property taxes are already too high,” Giannoulias said. “They’re crushing businesses. They’re crushing families.”

It was a risky, if not unexpected pledge that Chicagoans have heard time and time again during election season, including in 2023 when Johnson campaigned on not raising property taxes. The infamous third rail is decisively unpopular among taxpayers who feel they have sacrificed too much to buoy City Hall’s finances already.

But it is a difficult promise to keep, given that the city’s options for new revenues are limited and property taxes are one of the simplest, highest-yield levers to pull.

Johnson skipped Lightfoot’s consumer price index-linked property tax bump during his first budget, for 2024, in order to keep his campaign vow. He then broke the pledge the next year, proposing a whopping $300 million hike that aldermen roundly rejected.

Giannoulias also promised to make the annual “advance payment” to help further shore up the city’s vastly underfunded public pensions, should he win the mayor’s seat.

But he remained optimistic he could handle the financial pressure those commitments on property taxes and pensions would add to the city’s budget, saying tens of millions of public dollars could be saved by slashing “middle management positions,” consolidating city offices and bundling more city contracts under the procurement department to allow bulk purchasing.

Other economic proposals Giannoulias has called for include hiking the city’s minimum wage to $22 an hour and offering universal pre-K. On policing, he promised to hire 1,000 to 1,500 extra cops and reinstate the city’s ShotSpotter contract.

Johnson has not yet announced his reelection plans. But his team has been announcing a flurry of progressive initiatives that serve to excite his leftist base, including new data center regulations and a call for aldermen to adopt a moratorium on construction of the controversial tech developments in Chicago.

Giannoulias would not go that far on Thursday, saying the city should instead ensure new projects commit to “responsible” usage of water and electricity so as not to raise bills for Chicago residents.

“If it’s done responsibly and if they do it in an environmentally friendly way — if they do it by not using a lot of water, and if they cover theirs and other electric rates, I’d be open to having a conversation,” he said.

Giannoulias acknowledged that his path to balancing the budget requires new revenue that would need to go through Springfield, such as a 3% tax on millionaires. Such a feat would require a constitutional change voted in through a ballot referendum and likely take years to see dividends for city taxpayers.

To that end, he said a leader with strong relationships in Springfield is “the most important attribute of the next mayor.” And he said he had the strongest.

“It is malpractice for the mayor of Chicago not to have a relationship with Springfield: governor, Senate president, legislators. That takes time and effort,” Giannoulias said, notably leaving out House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, who has faced recent criticism that he failed to act for years on allegations that a Democratic representative sexually harassed a female staffer.

“If you’re not aggressively working with legislators who, by the way, want to fight for Chicago, if you’re not taking them out to lunch and dinner and getting to know them and explaining your priorities — not via press release, but by going down there — it’s difficult for anything to get done.”

Giannoulias kept his attacks on Johnson terse. He said the mayor’s attempts to tie him to former Mayor Rahm Emanuel, often through their shared financial support from billionaire Michael Sacks, are “ridiculous, and I would also use the word desperate.”

He said would focus on “hiring competent people with institutional knowledge” after the recent revolving door at City Hall. He did not delve deeply into what he thinks has driven the departures from Johnson’s team.

But Giannoulias said Johnson — who has repeatedly responded to staff controversies by saying “I don’t discuss personnel issues” — has a responsibility to be transparent about his administration.

“Your job is to talk about who you hire, who taxpayers are paying their salary for,” Giannoulias said. “Why people left, if people get fired or pushed out, why that’s relevant, the timing of it. All of those things are germane to your leadership ability and to turning the city around. So I would disagree with them. Respectfully disagree because I’m a nice guy.”

Asked if there was a city mayor he admired, Giannoulias offered San Francisco mayor Daniel Lurie.

“From a macro standpoint, he has changed the narrative around San Francisco,” Giannoulias said. “He’s helped bring people back to work. He’s focused on homelessness, public safety, and the narrative around San Francisco has gone from being dangerously abysmal to sparks of positivity.”