Maria Pappas Says She’s Running for Chicago Mayor

Maria Pappas plans to challenge incumbent Mayor Brandon Johnson when he is up for reelection in February 2027.

The Cook County Treasurer said she is “in and I’m not getting out. I just haven’t announced,” when asked if she plans to run on the WFLD program “Chicago Live.”

“The city needs a gray-haired grandmother who’s got the cajones to get everybody in shape, get everybody in the room, say, ‘this is the pie; you can only have a piece of it,’’ Pappas said.

Pappas, who has held post as the county’s treasurer since 1998, joins an early but growing list of candidates who have either declared or hinted they are considering a challenge to Johnson.

During her tenure, Pappas has had a key role in the distribution of property tax revenue for many decades, and has been in the middle of several attempts and pushes to reform or overhaul the property tax system.

Beginning in 2022 Pappas’ office performed studies that have pointed out inequities within property taxing systems in hopes of statewide reform. Pappas’ office published two reports that found that Illinois property tax law was negatively affecting homeowners who got behind on their tax bills.

The law allowed tax buyers to avoid paying based on typos or other small errors regarding how the property is described on government websites, and Pappas’ office sent legislation to Springfield to remedy the situation in 2023.

Earlier this summer, a federal judge just gave hundreds of homeowners the green light to sue Cook County over tax lien sales, granting class-action status to a lawsuit filed in 2022 by former homeowners and housing groups alleging the county’s embattled tax sale process strips property owners of their equity, in violation of the U.S. Constitution, allowing the case to move forward on behalf of as many as 1,700 Cook County homeowners.

The lawsuit alleges that Cook County’s tax sale process violates the U.S. Constitution by stripping property owners of their equity, citing the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Tyler v. Hennepin County.

Pappas argued the county was simply following state law and that any pocketed excess value was going to those private tax buyers, and Illinois is the only state affected by the Tyler ruling that hasn’t changed its laws. Around the same time Pappas postponed this year’s tax sale to 2026 in hopes lawmakers would act.

And a tax study from her office this month warned taxpayers that their incoming delayed bills will once again show increases, partly due to a sharp decline in Loop commercial property values.