Maria Hadden
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2019 - Present
2027
5
Maria Hadden is a member of the Chicago City Council in Illinois, representing Ward 49. She assumed office on May 20, 2019. Her current term ends on May 17, 2027.
Hadden ran for re-election to the Chicago City Council to represent Ward 49 in Illinois. She won in the general election on February 28, 2023.
Elections
2023
See also: City elections in Chicago, Illinois (2023)
General election
General election for Chicago City Council Ward 49
Incumbent Maria Hadden defeated Belia Rodriguez, Bill Morton, and Williamton Davis in the general election for Chicago City Council Ward 49 on February 28, 2023.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Maria Hadden (Nonpartisan) | 73.7 | 8,266 |
 | Belia Rodriguez (Nonpartisan)  | 16.6 | 1,867 | |
 | Bill Morton (Nonpartisan) | 9.7 | 1,086 | |
| Williamton Davis (Nonpartisan) (Write-in) | 0.0 | 3 | |
| Total votes: 11,222 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
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2019
See also: City elections in Chicago, Illinois (2019)
General election
General election for Chicago City Council Ward 49
Maria Hadden defeated incumbent Joseph Moore in the general election for Chicago City Council Ward 49 on February 26, 2019.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Maria Hadden (Nonpartisan) | 63.4 | 7,820 |
 | Joseph Moore (Nonpartisan) | 36.6 | 4,514 | |
| Other/Write-in votes | 0.1 | 7 | ||
| Total votes: 12,341 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Withdrawn or disqualified candidates
- Nathan Myers (Nonpartisan)
- Bill Morton (Nonpartisan)
Campaign themes
2023
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Maria Hadden did not complete Ballotpedia's 2023 Candidate Connection survey.
2019
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Chicago 2019 Candidate Survey
Maria Hadden completed Ballotpedia's Chicago candidates survey for 2019. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Hadden's responses.
Low-income families do not have the same choices, options, or alternatives when it comes to public school. How can this be addressed?
Our priority must be our supporting and fully funding our neighborhood public schools. In the 49th Ward we have some incredible schools that the community has rallied behind to support, despite being systematically underfunded. The teachers, staff, and (most importantly) the students in my neighborhood and around the city deserve advocates on City Council approving budgets that fully fund these schools. This includes investing in capital improvements, bringing in resources for special programming to boost enrollment, and ensuring every school has a nurse and social worker on site everyday. I also support promoting accountability in Chicago Public Schools, fully and equitably funding schools in black and brown communities across the city, and switching to an elected school board system. The people of the 49th Ward voted overwhelmingly to support a freeze on charter school expansion in the 2014 election. I will make sure their voice is heard on city council. While this is a major priority for me, I understand that public charter schools also serve many students in our city and we need to make sure that their administrations are being held to the same standards to ensure all children have a chance to thrive.
How would you address inequality within and between schools?
In the 49th Ward, our 6 neighborhood schools, which serve predominantly serve low-income black and brown children, have been systematically underfunded for decades. I plan to work at the local level to bring more resources to the table for supporting community fundraising efforts, boosting enrollment, and bringing more community members into relationship with our schools. In City Council, I will advocate for more accountability in Chicago Public Schools and more funding for schools in black and brown communities across the city. One of the best ways to accomplish accountability and transparency in CPS is to switch to an elected school board system. If elected, I will support legislation to establish such a body. More details on how I plan to pursue these efforts can be found in my education policy platform: https://www.mariafor49.org/education-policy
How can public schools better support their teachers and work more productively with the teachers’ union, parents, and the community?
I’m proud to have the support of the Chicago Teachers Union and to have relationships with members of local school council in our community. I want to work with them, as well as with parents and students to build bridges with our school system and work together to make sure everyone has access to quality education from teachers, nurses, socials workers, and librarians who are being compensated and treated fairly.
What do you believe are the greatest needs of kids in school today? How would you prioritize these needs and address them?
Our education budgets need to prioritize the health of our children. With 400,000 students in 600 schools, we are going to need more than 250 nurses and 275 social workers. The current practice of splitting time between schools results in huge caseloads. Given the physical and mental health needs of our students, every school needs to have a nurse and a social worker on site all day, every day. We need to prioritize budgets that make this possible, and need to establish an elected school board so that the community can elect decision makers who can enact these changes.
Do you believe that there is corruption in Chicago politics, such as pay-to-play practices when the city awards bids? If so, how would you address it?
Absolutely. We need to pass widespread ethics reform to increase accountability and transparency in our local government. We need to enact the fair elections ordinance to address money in politics, and make sure individuals and organizations, as well as alderman, do not benefit from pay-to-play practices. We must expand the powers of the Inspector General, and bring back the office of the Legislative Inspector General.
How would you make the city’s policies more responsive to community input instead of donors or special interests?
In addition to reforming how money plays a role in political campaigns, we need to make more spaces where people can meaningfully engage in the decision making process. Participatory budgeting and community driven zoning are both examples of how we can center the community in decision making processes and should be expanded to every ward and be used at the city-wide level.
How would you handle the “recurrence of unaddressed racially discriminatory conduct by officers” identified in the U.S. Justice Department’s investigative report of the Chicago PD published in 2017?
We need to ensure our police have the resources they need to be successful, including proper training to help promote accountability and trust. This includes training racial bias, conflict deescalation, and crisis intervention. Additionally enacting the Attorney General’s consent decree and establishing a civilian oversight board can help increase accountability in CPD to make lasting changes.
What sort of proposals would help reduce police shootings and fatalities?
Similar to above, increasing training, enacting the consent decree, and establishing a civilian oversight board can help increase accountability in CPD and reduce the number of police shooting going forward.
What ideas do you have to reduce the availability of illegal or unregistered guns in Chicago?
People own guns to feel safe. So while gun buyback programs offer great, non-confrontational opportunities to reduce the number of illegal guns, for communities to fully participate in them we must reduce their perceived need to own them for protection. To do so, we must be investing in these communities. If somebody has access to employment, housing, medical care, and mental health services, they are much more likely to feel secure and safe, which reduces their perceived need to own an illegal gun. By investing in schools, job training, affordable housing and other social services we can make this a reality. We can not rely on the current practice of CPD being the only entity extracting guns from these individuals during altercations.
How will you help to rebuild trust in the police department and to encourage the community to work with police?
Similar to my previous answers, I believe that the Chicago Police Department is in need of reform to increase accountability, improve the ability of CPD to serve communities and build public trust. The federally monitored consent decree is a good first step, but there is still a need to continue working with communities and experts to create meaningful change. We need to start revamping training to include crisis intervention, conflict de-escalation, and implicit bias to civilian oversight. We need to make sure we are creating systems that protect and serve all Chicagoans. To achieve more comprehensive reform, I support both the GAPA and CPAC ordinances. A good relationship between community and police is critical to ensuring everyone in our community is safe, so we must work together to help build that trust.
How would you address the displacement of people of color and long-term residents from their neighborhoods?
We must work to enact progressive policies around development and maintenance of affordable and accessible housing. I support both the Homes For All and Development For All ordinances to do so. These require one-for-one replacements of standing public housing units and revamp the Affordable Requirements Ordinance (ARO) policy to ensure we have balanced and inclusive patterns of development that will lessen and even reverse the impact housing segregation and gentrification have had across our city. We must lift the ban on rent control to expand the tools communities have to keep housing affordable. Also, we must engage the community in creating a proactive development plan for every ward and the city as a whole. Community driven zoning has been extremely effective elsewhere and should be a more extensively used practice here.
How would you care for the most vulnerable Chicagoans?
We need to be prioritizing vulnerable Chicagoans in all of our decisions on city council. The current definition of affordable housing, is still not affordable for the people in the most need, so in addition to improving existing policies, we need to be pursuing more holistic structural change that empowers and cares for everyone. We need to invest in expanding our social services, because there are some amazing agencies doing great work, but need more financial support to be able to reach more individuals and provide more services.
How would you ensure that development benefits residents in their neighborhoods and not solely the developers and other interests?
The 49th Ward is one of the few remaining affordable places to live on the northside of Chicago. However, the ever expanding gap between wages and cost of living is an untenable situation and the City needs to act to address this issue. While there have been a few recent success stories where our community has worked together to maintain affordable housing, the status quo of reacting to every new proposal is not sustainable. One of the biggest concerns individuals have voiced to me is the lack of a coherent plan for the development in the 49th Ward. Currently, development seems to be something that is just allowed to happen to us and community input, when allowed for, is often at the end of a decision-making process. Instead, I want to work with my neighbors to develop a plan for what we want to see happen in the ward over the next 5, 10, and even 50 years. We should be the ones starting conversations with local builders and developers saying “this is what we want/need - how can we work together to achieve this?” Community driven zoning has worked in other wards and will work here as well.
How would you distribute revenue fairly between neighborhoods?
We need to be making decisions about allocation of resources based on the need of an area. A perfect example of this is the current school funding formula. Funding based on the number of students, rather than the need of the school will exacerbate the challenges faced schools with decreasing enrollment that are in need of the capital to invest in new programs that will bring students back. We must use the same approach with our community resources. We must invest more where there is more need and ensure programs like TIFs do what they are intended to do - invest in low income areas to spur economic development, not line the pockets of developers for projects in high income areas.
How do you propose to resolve the city’s underfunded pension plan for city employees?
We made a commitment to city employees that we as a city have an obligation to keep. Backing down on those promises is not an option. Further, we must maintain the same level of investment in current and future city employees. The mismanagement of funds by prior city councils is not an excuse for not supporting working individuals. We must be dedicated to generating new revenue streams so we can continue to invest in the people responsible for serving our communities, public employees.
What’s your opinion on tax increment financing (a program that funds development using any additional property tax revenue that results from an increase in appraised property values)? What, if any, changes would you make to the use of TIF?
TIFs are used in most other places in our country without abuse or controversy. However, in Chicago they are often mismanaged resulting in public funds going to subsidize developer costs for projects in areas that are not truly blighted. We need to see a significant reform in how TIF money is allocated before approving any new ones. For example, the “Back to Basics” TIF ordinance would limit the use of TIFs to redevelopment projects in areas that would truly be unable to move forward without TIF support. If a company or institution behind a project could afford it on their own, they should not be getting a blank check from the city. While this does not solve all problems and will need clear definitions of what does/does not qualify, committing to getting back to the main reason TIFs exist—to spur development in low income areas—is a major step to fixing this problem. Another way we can reform the TIF system is by allowing for the reallocation of dollars from TIFs that have been filled to other development projects such as capital improvements in schools or building out our cities green infrastructure.
How would you assess the city's finances, and if your proposals would require new spending, how would you pay for them?
The City of Chicago is in desperate need for new revenue. This must be done in ways that are not designed to adversely impact middle and working-class families. I support new progressive revenue streams such as the LaSalle Tax to increase money coming from the finance industry, a real estate transfer tax, a progressive income tax, and legalizing and taxing recreational marijuana. While the latter may not be inherently progressive, if the revenue was properly reinvested in low income communities, particularly black and brown communities, we might be able to finally start reversing some of the harm the war on drugs has had in those communities. In short, we need to start prioritizing progressive revenue streams across the board. While some policy changes require action at the state level, local elected leaders must use their privilege to amplify the voices of residents to be heard in Springfield.
Would you be in favor of freezing property taxes, at least for low-income households, so that people can stay where they are living?
I would only consider increases in property taxes or sales taxes if other more progressive revenue raising options were off the table. Both are regressive modes of taxation that will impact working families more than they affect wealthy individuals.
How would you increase access to quality food and urgent care in all parts of the city?
As with my policy positions on other issues, I believe we should equitably distribute resources in the city such that low-income and vulnerable populations are supported and empowered. In City Council, I would support policies to investment to address food deserts in low and middle income neighborhoods. I also support re-opening the mental health clinics closed in 2011, renewed investment in mental health services, and the building of new hospitals and community health centers in historically neglected neighborhoods. When pursuing these changes, we must engage experts in the field and members of communities to ensure that the decisions being made incorporate best practices and address what the community identifies as being important.
How will you address public health concerns such as contaminated drinking water, rat infestation, and lead poisoning?
We need to immediately address the potential contamination of our water supply by lead pipes. Last summer, my campaign helped collect signatures for a ballot referendum asking City Council to hold hearings on this issue. In both the drinking water and rat infestation situations, the solution is a real investment in building out our cities infrastructure to be green and sustainable. This investment is not cheap, but can be a driver for jobs and economic growth, while also addressing public health concerns now and in the future.
How would you make Chicago a cleaner city with less waste and pollution?
We need to work with experts and advocates to create a greener infrastructure and promote sustainability on the individual, neighborhood, and city wide level.
What would be your first steps for improving the transit system in terms of affordability, accessibility, and safety?
We must invest in a public transportation that is sustainable and accessible to all communities. It will be a big cost, but this will be an economic driver both now and in the future. Additionally, I believe we need to expand our current railway system to make sure every station is accessible for people living with disabilities. In the 49th Ward, one of our Red Line stops is not and needs to be updated as soon as possible, as do all like it across the city.
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See also
2023 Elections
External links
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Officeholder Chicago City Council Ward 49 |
Personal |
Footnotes
| Political offices | ||
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| Preceded by - |
Chicago City Council Ward 49 2019-Present |
Succeeded by - |
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State of Illinois Springfield (capital) |
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