CHICAGO (WLS) — A Chicago City Council committee approved an alternative budget plan brought by a group of alderpersons on Tuesday.

A group of alderpersons presented the plan, which more than half of city council members are currently supporting, during Tuesday’s Finance Committee meeting.

ABC7 Chicago is now streaming 24/7. Click here to watch

The substitute budget ordinance faced scrutiny from supporters of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s budget during the hearing, which lasted several hours.

The alternate budget group is looking to build support for their plan even as they put additional council meetings on the schedule, including meetings this weekend and on Christmas Eve.

The Finance Committee meeting revealed some new revenue options for the 2026 budget proposal and tweaked some others.

It includes raising the plastic shopping bag tax from $0.10 to $0.15, and a pilot program to put advertising on bridge houses as well as light poles.

RELATED | Chicago City Council revises alternative budget proposal, mayor defends head tax as deadline looms

It officially gets rid of the corporate head tax, which has been a major source of contention since Johnson first presented his budget plan. The mayor and his allies are insisting that corporations pay more.

“What you have here is balancing the budget with fines and fees and taking out the corporate head tax. I want to hear your rationale to do that,” said 25th Ward Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez.

“Our proposal, in terms of new revenues, impacts businesses at 84% and individuals at 16%. I want everybody to take a look at this for a minute,” said Budget Committee Vice Chair Ald. Nicole Lee.

The alternative budget group says this plan is 98% in line with Johnson’s. Still, some of his allies were frustrated at not seeing the numbers sooner.

READ MORE | Chicago budget discussions reach stalemate, raising possibility of 1st-ever city government shutdown

“This is our first time reviewing this. This is incredibly disrespectful,” said 35th Ward Ald. Anthony Quezada.

There were also questions about the alternate plan to sell off outstanding debt to raise nearly $90 million. The city comptroller cautioned against it.

“I would say is that I would not. I would not rely on $89 million in this budget. This has never been done by any state,” said Chicago Comptroller Michael Belsky.

But supporters are defending this plan as worthy of consideration calling projections conservative and balanced.

“The group that’s worked on this has spent hundreds of hours bringing in the majority of the city council to talk about this,” said 19th Ward Ald. Matt O’Shea. “We relied on the advice and counsel of budgetary experts.”

The alternative budget plan passed out of finance committee 22-13. Its next stop is the Budget Committee on Wednesday.

It is clear that this breakaway group is flexing its muscle. What’s not clear is what the mayor’s next move will be.

But we now have city council meetings planned for Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and then, Tuesday and Wednesday of next week.

Johnson issued a statement on Tuesday evening, saying, “As the leaders of the Alternative Group made clear throughout their presentation, the Secret Budget that passed out of the Finance Committee this afternoon is substantially similar to the proposal we introduced more than two months ago.

At our insistence, the Alternative Group agreed to restore the cuts they made to youth employment, and they removed the proposal to double the garbage tax. They have finally conceded to some degree, the point that I have made from the beginning: that corporations must pay their fair share in order to protect Chicagoans at this moment.

Unfortunately, at the behest of certain corporate interests, they chose to replace a tax on the largest corporations with $90M+ in “enhanced debt collections” on everyday Chicagoans. This seems to be in direct contradiction with their expressed desires to shift the financial burden away from working people.

Not only is this proposal immoral, it is simply not feasible. There is no way to sell off Chicagoans’ debts that would yield that amount of revenue. If passed as is, this proposal would likely result in a significant midyear budget shortfall and leave Chicagoans vulnerable to deep cuts to city services.

We will spend the next few days with our budget, finance, legal, and policy teams reviewing these proposals. Chicago cannot afford a government shutdown when we are making so much progress growing our economy and reducing violent crime to historic lows.

Tomorrow, the Budget Committee will review their proposal publicly so that Chicagoans can understand exactly what is in this Secret Budget.”

Edwin Mata is CEO & Co-Founder of Brickken.

Discover top fintech news and events!

Subscribe to FinTech Weekly’s newsletter

Read by executives at JP Morgan, Coinbase, Blackrock, Klarna and more

In digital finance, we love noise. New apps, tokens, and “disruptive” models get all the airtime. Yet, the real inflection point is unfolding in the most unglamorous corner of the industry: compliance, governance, and record-keeping.

Regulation is not the backdrop to innovation. It is the mechanism through which the sector becomes investable, scalable and credible. Today’s inflection point is defined not by a new consumer product but by whether digital assets can meet the governance expectations that global finance takes for granted.

Regulation as the Moment of Maturity

Traditional finance learned this a long time ago. Modern capital markets only became investable at scale after securities laws in the 1930s forced transparency, continuous disclosure, and enforcement, restoring confidence after catastrophic failures. The US Securities Exchange Act of 1934 didn’t kill markets; it gave them the legal scaffolding to grow into the backbone of global savings.

Crypto and digital assets are now entering a similar “boringly serious” phase. In the EU, the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, or MiCA, is designed to give legal clarity to crypto-asset issuers and service providers. For institutional compliance teams, that kind of predictability is far more important than whichever buzzword happens to dominate a conference stage.

The impact on capital flows is already visible: 83% of institutional investors plan to increase allocations to digital assets with regulatory clarity as a key driver of that enthusiasm. Clear rules don’t strangle innovation, they compress uncertainty and lower the risk premium that has kept cautious money on the sidelines.

The Boring Revolution Behind Institutional Capital

That’s why the real story in digital finance is a “boring revolution.” The work that actually matters now is the industrialisation of KYC and KYB, AML monitoring, standardized reporting, on-chain and off-chain reconciliation, governance workflows, and provable rights attached to digital instruments. The industry still loves to obsess over the next shiny app, but the real bottleneck is whether institutions can trust the rails beneath the interface.

RegTech has quietly reframed compliance tooling as an edge rather than a punishment. Technology-driven compliance improves risk assessment, fraud detection, and overall competitiveness because it lets institutions scale digital finance without losing sight of their exposure. That is where the durable upside sits, in making digital assets behave like a serious asset class, not a speculative game with good branding.

From the vantage point of building tokenization infrastructure, the pattern is consistent. When institutions evaluate real-world-asset tokenization, they don’t begin by asking which chain you use or how “decentralized” it is. Their focus is not the chain. It is whether ownership, entitlements, corporate actions and governance can be evidenced, enforced and audited in ways that align with securities law and accounting standards. If those foundations are sound, the rest of the architecture becomes negotiable.

You can see the same shift in where venture money is going. Over 70% of digital asset investment now targets institutional and infrastructure-focused platforms, up from just 27% a decade ago; the funding narrative has pivoted away from consumer speculation toward institutional plumbing. 

That is not a romantic story, but it is the kind that tends to survive more than one market cycle.

From Flashy Apps to Trustworthy Systems

Banks and large asset managers are adjusting their priorities accordingly. Governance, risk management, and compliance modernisation are stressed as core investment themes, especially as new digital-asset rules and prudential standards come into force. Digital finance is being pulled into the centre of regulated balance sheets and internal control frameworks.

At the same time, some institutions now describe digital assets, including tokenized bonds and money-market funds, as a “mainstream subject” for their clients. We explicitly link the shift from fringe to mainstream to better regulatory frameworks and institutional-grade infrastructure rather than retail hype. The catalyst is not design; it is the underlying certainty that these instruments carry governance, accounting treatment and supervisory oversight consistent with established financial products.

This is the narrative inversion digital finance still struggles with. For a decade, the space behaved as if UX, community and tokenomics could overpower everything else. That era produced experimentation, but also a long tail of ungoverned projects that institutional capital simply cannot touch.

If digital finance wants to sit alongside public equities, investment-grade debt and regulated funds, the front end has to be the last question. What matters is whether the system can prove who owns what, under which rules, and with what recourse when things go wrong. That’s the baseline requirement for anyone managing real risk.

Compliance as Product, Not Overhead

The opportunity for fintech founders now is to treat compliance engineering, data governance and risk architecture as core product. The firms that take regulatory expectations seriously, encode them into workflows, and expose them as reliable platforms will become the quiet chokepoints of the next cycle. Regulated entities won’t integrate ten different “innovative” front ends if each one creates a new audit headache; they will integrate the boring rails that make their auditors and supervisors more comfortable, not less.

Collaboration with regulators is becoming central to this shift. Around the world, supervisory authorities are establishing innovation pathways, industry working groups and controlled testing environments that allow technical design and regulatory expectations to evolve together. This model may disappoint purists who prefer unbounded experimentation, but it is the only credible way to align programmable financial systems with the governance, risk and reporting obligations of real-world finance.

The irony is that the least glamorous corner of digital finance is where the most durable value will be created. The “boring revolution” is the recognition that trust, compliance and governance are not obstacles to innovation but the substrate on which the next generation of financial systems will quietly compound.

As the Santa Barbara Unified school board faces a projected $20 million deficit and declining reserves, trustees voted unanimously Thursday night to change who leads the district’s Finance Committee — removing community member Todd Voigt in favor of future boardmember leadership.

The move — approved in Resolution 2024-25-32A — immediately drew criticism from parents, primarily on the Facebook page S.B. Parent Leadership Action Network (S.B. PLAN), who accused the board of consolidating power just as the district’s fiscal outlook grows increasingly precarious.

“This is a power grab,” said Michele Voigt, wife of Todd Voigt and a San Marcos parent who spoke during public comment. “We are at a point of serious financial concern, and the board is reducing independent oversight.”

Voigt urged the board to view the First Interim Budget Report as more than numbers on a slide. “I’m asking you tonight to look at this first interim not as a technical report, but a test of your governance and your duty to the community you represent,” she said. “Your own projections point to reserves falling below the state minimum and trending toward zero within a few years. And no one will be able to say that they didn’t see it coming.”

Despite Voigt’s comments, the district’s interim financial report told a more nuanced story. The district’s chief business official, Conrad Tedeschi, iterated different figures, figures that were part of the long-term financial plan approved by the board. Overall the numbers were not a surprise, emphasizing that the district is not in crisis and remains above the state-mandated 3 percent minimum reserve level.

According to Tedeschi, there are improved revenue projections and a growing deficit. Total revenue for 2024-25 increased to $244 million, up from the adopted budget, driven by higher-than-expected one-time grants, including a major boost to the Expanded Learning Opportunity Program, which rose from a projected $3 million to $5.2 million after the state updated its formula. However, expenditures also climbed, pushing the projected deficit from $15 million to $20 million. Tedeschi said the increase reflects rising labor costs following the district’s recent wage settlement with teachers. Salaries and benefits now account for 81 percent of all district spending. 

Despite the shortfall, Tedeschi emphasized that reserves remain above target: currently at 8.52 percent, compared to the board’s adopted budget of 8.92 percent and well above the state-required 3 percent minimum. Multi-year projections show that with planned reductions, the deficit could shrink to $6.7 million by 2027-28, provided the district makes at least $6 million in cuts over the next two years to maintain a minimum 5 percent reserve. “That’s not a satisfactory level for a basic aid district,” Tedeschi said, “but staying above 5 percent is the minimum needed to keep our budget certified.”

Still, there was ongoing tension over who chairs the Finance Committee — centering on concerns about transparency and legal compliance. The board’s newly passed resolution requires that only elected trustees can serve as committee chair, replacing community member Todd Voigt with a boardmember moving forward.

At the heart of the move is compliance with the Brown Act, California’s open-meeting law that governs transparency in public agencies. Under the law, committees subject to the Brown Act must have properly agendized items for any votes or actions to be legal and binding. Board President William Banning said the Finance Committee had previously taken action on items not properly listed on agendas, potentially violating the law and opening the district to liability. 

“These amendments reinforce that commitment [to compliance] and position the Finance Committee to continue its work in a way that is focused, lawful, collaborative, and ultimately highly valuable to the board and the community we serve,” Banning said.

The amended resolution changes Finance Committee bylaws to require that only a boardmember may serve as chair, ending Voigt’s tenure. It also outlines procedures for member removal and reaffirms the committee’s advisory-only role.

“I am the Chair of the Finance Committee, maybe for 15 more minutes,” said Todd Voigt during public comment. “I agreed to serve because I care deeply about this community and its future. I’m a volunteer with no political ambitions. My sole purpose is to provide sound advice and expertise for the benefit of our schools.”

Voigt called the resolution a “serious mistake” and warned that removing the independent chair would erode the very trust the district had been trying to rebuild. “If the board controls both the committee and its leadership, that independence disappears,” he said.

He also made a pointed recommendation to the board. “Should this passage occur … I strongly urge the board to select Boardmember [Celeste] Kafri as the chairperson. She has consistently demonstrated a commitment to addressing the district’s financial challenges,” Voigt said. “By contrast… Boardmember Banning opposed a committee goal I proposed to reduce the deficit. Leadership that does not prioritize deficit reduction is unacceptable.”

Board President William Banning, who was formally elected to the role earlier in the evening, defended the resolution and its timing.

“This is a normal part of building effective governance structures,” he said. “The resolution … strengthens Brown Act compliance … clarifies the committee’s strictly advisory role … and ensures that meetings are presided over by a trustee trained in Open Meeting Law and accountable to the public.”

Banning said that while the original intent was to demonstrate openness by appointing a community chair, it had created confusion around agenda-setting and governance boundaries. “That pattern typically follows the line of … a community member is chair in an attempt to demonstrate openness and shared leadership … and then in early meeting experiences, there is agenda-setting confusion, there’s boundary drift, and difficulties with Brown Act procedures.”

Boardmember Kafri pushed back on parts of the resolution, questioning why the committee chair needed to be replaced at all. “Why is it that we need to replace the committee head … because of a misunderstanding about the Brown Act when most of the committee members have never been on a Brown Act committee before?” she asked. “Could an orientation and a better understanding … prevent future Brown Act violations?”

That prompted clarification from Banning: “It is not only common, but standard practice throughout the state of California … that the committee chair be one of the appointed board representatives.”

Boardmember Gabe Escobedo supported Kafri’s interest in making the committee more effective, but reminded the board to stay focused. “More of what Ms. Kafri is talking about is like the mechanics, and I trust that Mr. Tedeschi will be responsive to the needs of the group and be able to present the information in a way that is going to be digestible,” he said. “What I would hope is that we can focus more on just the mechanics of what’s in the resolution — the words.”

The resolution passed unanimously, but not without raising questions about trust, power, and what transparency means when community expertise is asked to sit down.

As Escobedo noted: “We have the fiduciary responsibility…. It only makes sense to direct the work of the advisory committee to aid us in making those really difficult decisions.”