October 13, 2026
The following is testimony delivered by Civic Federation President Joe Ferguson to the Illinois House Executive Committee at an October 13, 2026 subject matter hearing on HB5282, legislation that would enable the City of Chicago to adopt a city charter.
A city charter serves as the constitution for a municipal government. It defines how a city’s government is structured, which officials are elected or appointed, and what powers they wield. It sets the rules of the game for policy and decision-making in the city. And Chicago is the only major city in the United States of America without one.
Let me reiterate that point. I’m not saying that Chicago’s city constitution is flawed or dysfunctional in some way. I’m saying that it doesn’t exist. This is not new. In 1954, a Chicago Home Rule Commission constituted of elected officials noted that Chicago’s lack of a municipal charter was an anachronism in the United States. That anachronism has not aged well over the last 72 years.
What does it mean for Chicago to have no charter? It means that there is no coherent, enforceable structure to the way government works here. Inadequate transparency, factionalist politics, and almost constant fiscal crises are just some of the issues that haunt Chicago. But these issues are not unconnected. They are all symptoms of the same disease.
Chicago’s government is not structured to be accountable to voters. We leave to members of City Council the power to draw their own wards and then manage them, but we don’t equip them to succeed as legislators governing the entire City. And we have essentially zero structural checks and balances on the decisions made by the Mayor, who for much of the City’s modern history has functioned as the equivalent of both the President (or Governor) and the Speaker of the House.
We can tinker with these problems at the margins—providing a little more authority to the City Council here, advocating for a better budget process there—but we won’t fix the root cause of Chicago’s governance problems unless we undertake a fundamental reevaluation of the City’s governance structures. Establishing a city charter is the best way to accomplish that.
Ultimately the decisions on what to change about Chicago’s government will lie with a charter commission with the input of the voters. But I want to provide a few possible examples of what may come of a charter commission so that you understand the potential ways a city charter could improve the way that Chicago’s government makes decisions and runs. A charter might include:
- Changing which Citywide offices are elected in order to create independent checks and balances on the Mayor such as an elected Comptroller or Corporation Counsel.
- Providing funding for a quasi-independent professional office of financial analysis for the City Counsel. At the state level, the Governor has a budget office, but the state legislature you all ably serve has its own commission that provides independent, financial analysis. I’m sure that many of you have found COGFA to be essential during the budget season. The Chicago City Council technically has a whisp of a financial analysis office as well—but not with the requisite resources and independence to do the job for a City with a $16 billion dollar budget, over 32,000 employees, thousands of contractors, a fragile credit rating and crushing long-term legacy debt and pension obligations. It has enough funding for only five staff members and produces just a few reports each year. This means that the Council’s hands are tied behind its back during each budget season.
- Requiring additional oversight for long-term concessions. New York City has a commission of elected leaders that must review and approve any long-term asset sales. If Chicago had such a commission in 2008, it might have pumped the breaks on the infamous parking meter deal. But our complete lack of checks and balances led that deal to be waved through an underinformed Council with no capacity—and no legal right to the information or analytical capabilities to vet, score and understand the deal—and the City will be paying for it for decades.
There are many more changes that a commission could make. But in order to be transparent and legitimate, those decisions should be up to the people of Chicago. That is why this legislation calls for the election of a commission that will be charged with drafting a City Charter, followed by a ballot referendum required by the Illinois State Constitution to allow voters the option to approve or reject the charter that the commission drafts. Under this bill, decisions on how Chicago’s government works will rest exactly where they should—with the people of Chicago.
There are two things most people do not like. The way things are, and change. At the city, region and state level, we all know that the way things are is no longer sustainable. So we have no choice but to change. A charter itself will directly change nothing at the policy level, but it will change everything by providing structures, principles and processes to guide how we go about making the changes we all know are needed, in a way that is transparent, accountable, inclusive of the people, and enforceable. This City’s government has been dysfunctional for far too long. A charter will not fix every problem that Chicago is facing. But it will give us the tools that we need to start fixing those problems—tools that, today, we do not even have.
I urge you to support this bill, and I stand ready to answer your questions.