Mayor Lori Lightfoot reported making $497,000 in 2019, her first year in office, according to a tax return released by the mayor’s office.
Lightfoot, who took office on May 20 that year, made $111,120 in city wages for the portion of the year she was mayor and $352,645 from Mayer Brown, her former law firm, the return shows.
The mayor’s effective tax rate was 30.7%.
Lightfoot’s adjusted gross income the year before was $813,000 from Mayer Brown, according to her tax filing.
During the mayoral campaign, Lightfoot reported an average adjusted gross income of $971,626 from 2014 through 2017, from Mayer Brown, which she left in 2018 to run for mayor. She paid an effective tax rate of 38.6% over the four years.
Sign up for The Spin to get the top stories in politics delivered to your inbox weekday afternoons.
Two days after this story published online, Lightfoot officials said, “The reason there was income reported from Mayer Brown in 2019 is that there were still cash collections allocated to Mayor Lightfoot related to work in process when she was a partner at Mayer Brown.”
“There is no income reportable to Mayor Lightfoot from Mayer Brown in 2020,” a spokeswoman said.
The mayor’s office previously did not answer repeated questions about why she earned money from Mayer Brown in 2019.
In all six years, Lightfoot filed taxes in several states in addition to Illinois, including New York, California and Minnesota. She previously explained that she had an ownership stake in the law firm, which does business in various states and internationally.
Politicians are not required to release their tax returns but it’s a political norm, especially at the federal level, though President Donald Trump often was criticized for refusing to release his.
The Tribune annually requests the Chicago mayor’s tax returns. Former Mayor Rahm Emanuel released his full tax records for 13 years, dating back to 2005, through the filing he submitted in 2018.
