Ugo Okere
Ugo Okere ran for election to the Chicago City Council to represent Ward 40 in Illinois. Okere lost in the general election on February 26, 2019.
Okere completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2019. Click here to read the survey answers.
Okere responded to Ballotpedia's unique candidate survey for 2019 Chicago candidates. The survey questions were developed with input from more than 100 Chicagoans in the months preceding the 2019 election. Here is one selected response:
"My pledge is to never support a property tax increase until we have pushed for actual progressive revenue options in this city. We have asked working families to pay more than their fair share for far too long. It is time for mega corporations and the ultra wealthy to pay their fair share."
Click here to read more of Okere's responses.
Elections
2019
See also: City elections in Chicago, Illinois (2019)
General runoff election
General runoff election for Chicago City Council Ward 40
André Vasquez defeated incumbent Patrick O'Connor in the general runoff election for Chicago City Council Ward 40 on April 2, 2019.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ |  | André Vasquez (Nonpartisan)  | 53.9 | 7,509 |
 | Patrick O'Connor (Nonpartisan) | 46.1 | 6,431 | |
| Total votes: 13,940 | |||
| = 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. | ||||
General election
General election for Chicago City Council Ward 40
Incumbent Patrick O'Connor and André Vasquez advanced to a runoff. They defeated Dianne Daleiden, Maggie O'Keefe, and Ugo Okere in the general election for Chicago City Council Ward 40 on February 26, 2019.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Patrick O'Connor (Nonpartisan) | 33.3 | 4,446 |
| ✔ | | André Vasquez (Nonpartisan) | 20.1 | 2,683 |
 | Dianne Daleiden (Nonpartisan) | 17.2 | 2,296 | |
 | Maggie O'Keefe (Nonpartisan) | 15.4 | 2,058 | |
| Ugo Okere (Nonpartisan) | 14.0 | 1,870 | ||
| Total votes: 13,353 | |||
| = 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. | ||||
Campaign themes
2019
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Chicago 2019 Candidate Survey
Ugo Okere completed Ballotpedia's Chicago candidates survey for 2019. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Okere'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?
The current difficulties that Chicago’s public schools face result from the failure to invest and support our city schools. This is a city where our schools are not just separated by race, but also by class; a city where both the debts and failures to invest affect black and brown residents and working class communities. Additionally, my platform outlines my demands for a nurse, certified social workers, and librarian in every CPS school, in addition to a moratorium on charter school expansion and privatization efforts, which is often used to pull funding away from already under-resourced schools and communities.
How would you address inequality within and between schools?
The second tenet of our campaign is equity. Equity is the not the same thing as equality, but it’s about investing in places that need it the most. The most profound issues of equity are in our school system. We need to fight for an elected school board at the state level to ensure that our school board is run by educators and parents, not lawyers and CEOs of big businesses. Then and only then can we see a school board that allocates funding based on need rather than political favor. To support that endeavor, we will in turn need a public financing system for Chicago’s elections to ensure that our school board is not monopolized by in the interest of the top 1%.
How can public schools better support their teachers and work more productively with the teachers’ union, parents, and the community?
The current difficulties that Chicago’s public schools face result from the failure to invest and support our city schools. This is a city where our schools are not just separated by race, but also by class; a city where both the debts and failures to invest affect black and brown residents and working class communities. My platform outlines my demands for a nurse, certified social workers, and librarian in every CPS school, in addition to a moratorium on charter school expansion and privatization efforts, which is often used to pull funding away from already under-resourced schools and communities.
What do you believe are the greatest needs of kids in school today? How would you prioritize these needs and address them?
The greatest needs of kids in school is to have fully-funded schools, well-paid and well-resourced teachers, and ensuring that every school supports its students and its local community. A good education also requires ensuring that schools are safe and able to meet the need of all students. Every CPS schools needs a nurse, certified social workers, and librarian. Finally, disinvesting and starving our existing public schools for funds is not the way to accomplish equitable education opportunities and outcomes across the city’s schools.
What are your proposals for supporting children before and after school? What would be your ideal afterschool programs?
Every school needs to have the funding and ability to provide exemplary after school programs to its students. These after school programs should range from tutoring to expansive endeavors in art, music and trades. Our public school system has seen the devaluation and undermining of a quality music and art education, and as someone who was fortunate enough to get a quality music education in a CPS high school, I see this as a top priority.
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?
Corruption is a problem, yet corruption isn’t just about our politicians lining their pockets, it affects our lives, our children’s schools, how our neighborhoods develop, and local small businesses. Corruption means politicians are making decisions based off of their own bottom line, rather than the life and health of the neighborhood. The policies that would help curb corruption are ensuring that alderman cannot have second jobs, publicly financing elections, and implementing community-driven zoning process so that the community is making the decision regarding what development projects move forward, instead development projects entirely depending upon the alderman’s behest.
How would you make the city’s policies more responsive to community input instead of donors or special interests?
A central tenet of my campaign is co-governance, which is the concept that it is not me going into city council, but it is the entire ward going into city council. Through this system, we will build a democracy where average working people have a seat at the table and government in their hands. Policies like a community-driven zoning process would make the city more responsive to community input, and give the power to working people to shape their ward, rather than allowing business interests and developers to shape it for them. I would also introduce participatory budgeting into the 40th Ward to give the local community democratic control of the 1.3 million dollars in infrastructure funds given to the 40th.
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?
I support the federally monitored consent decree for the CPD, and it does not go far enough. Black and brown residents of the City of Chicago are fearful of the Chicago Police Department for good reason. Police shootings and intimidation of black and brown youth are out of control. Across this city, there are far too many grieving mothers who have lost their children to police violence. The city needs a Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC) with the ability to hire and fire police officers who gun down black and brown youth in the streets. No iteration of police accountability mechanisms, whether COPA or IPRA, have proven to have the teeth necessary to reign in police misconduct. There are thousands of supporters across the city and hundreds in my ward who are calling for this ordinance to pass.
What sort of proposals would help reduce police shootings and fatalities?
Again, reducing police brutality and violence requires greater oversight of the police by the people of Chicago and greater accountability. The reduction of police shootings means fighting for CPAC, for eliminating the “gang” database, fighting at every turn against the school to prison pipeline, closing the loopholes in Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance, working for reforms to the Fraternal Order of Police contract, and emphasizing that there should be community-driven solutions to local issues, not increased police presence.
What ideas do you have to reduce the availability of illegal or unregistered guns in Chicago?
We need to work with state partners to stop the influx of illegal guns from neighboring states like Indiana that have much more lax gun laws that Chicago. We then need to push for stronger federal gun control measures.
How will you help to rebuild trust in the police department and to encourage the community to work with police?
First is through CPAC, because holding the police accountable is only a threat to police brutality, not to the community’s safety. Second, we must put trained and unarmed social workers in our police department to act as the first responders to individuals who are experiencing a mental health crisis, instead of armed police. Finally, we need to start from a point of asking ourselves how we can transform the police department to be an agency that the community wants to work with.
How would you address criminal justice issues such as prison reform and the reintegration of formerly incarcerated persons into city life?
I support a 15-point violence prevention plan which would address both prison reform and reintegration. Additionally, I would work to end cash bail, repurpose $100 million in city budgeting to employ Chicagoans particularly on the south and west sides of Chicago, developing of City Peer Support Coach program that would work with at-risk youth and individuals reentering society, and work with the state’s attorney's office to provide alternative sentencing for non-violent offenders.
How would you address the displacement of people of color and long-term residents from their neighborhoods?
Over half of renting households in Cook County are rent burdened. Neighborhoods across the city are gentrifying, life is increasingly precarious for working-class families, and long-time residents are being pushed out of their neighborhoods with between 20 to 30 thousand evictions filed in court each year. Across the city and within the 40th ward, the increasing rent and property taxes are making life in Chicago more difficult, unnecessarily cruel, and unsustainable for residents. To reach an adequate amount of affordable housing, we will need 44,000 additional units of truly affordable housing. That means we need to do a multitude of things. We need to legalize accessory dwelling units to allow unique and additional options for housing. We need a robust expansion of affordable housing in the city, and a city wide strategy as to how we will equitably invest in affordable housing across Chicago rather than just in areas where poverty is concentrated. We also need to work to lift the ban on rent control in Illinois and enact it in Chicago.
How would you care for the most vulnerable Chicagoans?
I’ve witnessed the consequences of leadership that refuses to put a commitment to working people and marginalized groups first. We are living in a city where our public school system is segregated not just by race, but also by class. We are living in a city where black and brown residents are fearful of the Chicago Police Department. And, we are living in a city, where our debts and obligations are balanced on the backs of the most marginalized and oppressed among us. In order to protect and work for our city's vulnerable I would push for an elected public school board, equitable school funding, a vast expansion of affordable housing, raising progressive not regressive revenue, implementation of CPAC, addressing the crisis of lead in our water, and community control of local government through participatory budgeting and a community-driven zoning process.
How would you ensure that development benefits residents in their neighborhoods and not solely the developers and other interests?
Overall, affordable housing is the most pressing issue facing 40th Ward constituents and residents across the city. In neighborhoods like Lincoln Square and Andersonville, rents are skyrocketing and our housing supply is shrinking. Rather than building affordable housing in the ward, developers rather than residents are benefiting from construction and development. Because of this, long time residents are being pushed out of their homes and out of our neighborhood. Improving housing in the 40th Ward and ensuring that residents and working families benefit from developments is a priority of mine that I will look to achieve through a number of avenues. To start, I will work to pass the Keeping the Promise Ordinance to ensure the Chicago Housing Authority uses its resources to create racially equitable, affordable housing. I will also create a community-driven zoning process so that decisions on ward developments are made by actual residents of the 40th Ward. I will work with state officials to get the ban on rent control lifted and then help enact rent control for Chicago. And I will help create more mixed-income housing opportunities with the input of 40th Ward residents.
How would you distribute revenue fairly between neighborhoods?
While the alderman does not control the distribution of the full city’s finances, alderman do have a say in how revenue is spent. When it comes to the issue of equity in revenue distribution, alderman, particularly those on the northside have to recognize when a development or pot of money could be better used in a neighborhood that has historically been disinvested from. Within our ward’s neighborhoods however, how this applies is clearer. Our campaign’s first tenet is co-governance, which is the idea that it isn’t squarely me going into city council, but the entire ward. That means we are pushing for policies like participatory budgeting and building a community driven zoning process for a transparent and open process of how our resources are allocated in our ward.
How do you propose to resolve the city’s underfunded pension plan for city employees?
Increasingly, Chicago is a city that whose programs and revenue are balanced on the back of working-class communities. Pushing back against this involves the city raising progressive revenue instead of regressive revenue to pay for the city’s pension plan. Our problem in chicago is lack of revenue, and the failure of mega corporations and the ultra-wealthy to pay their fair share. As alderman, I would fight for a LaSalle Street Tax, a tax on vacant luxury housing, a Bad Business Fee for businesses who get caught committing wage theft and other illegal workplace violations, a Real Estate Transfer Tax increase on homes over a $750,000 threshold, a Corporate Head tax, and any other tax that ensures the wealthy pay their fair share without hurting working class people. Additionally, I would support the creation of a municipal public bank for the City of Chicago, to ensure that the residents of Chicago have access to fair and reliable financial services but also to provide Chicago with another progressive revenue stream.
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 were created to support blighted and impoverished neighborhoods, yet in its decades long history, it has never done that. I support the abolition and draining of TIF funds. For far too long, TIF funds have been used to enrich and support the top 1% and wealthy developers. We have given $55 million to Navy Pier for renovations and millions of dollars to the development of luxury housing. The intention of TIF was to support blighted neighborhoods. It is not doing that. This money should be going back to our infrastructure, our schools, and our communities.
How would you assess the city's finances, and if your proposals would require new spending, how would you pay for them?
The city does not have an issue with debt, but it has an issue with revenue. If we truly had a an issue of debt, we would not be spending 95 million dollars on a new police academy, 55 million on renovations for Navy Pier, or billions on the Lincoln Yards project. The issue is revenue, and the question is who will be paying for it. Our campaign has laid out a multitude of progressive streams of revenue including, the Vacant Homes Tax, reinstating the corporate head tax, a Bad Business Fee, and the La Salle Street Tax. These forms of progressive revenue is how we would pay for new spending.
Would you be in favor of freezing property taxes, at least for low-income households, so that people can stay where they are living?
My pledge is to never support a property tax increase until we have pushed for actual progressive revenue options in this city. We have asked working families to pay more than their fair share for far too long. It is time for mega corporations and the ultra wealthy to pay their fair share.
How would you increase access to quality food and urgent care in all parts of the city?
We need to repurpose funds to address food deserts on the south and west sides of Chicago. We also need to recognize that only until recently did the south side have a trauma center. We need to push for a vast capital plan to build urgent care centers and hospitals throughout the south and west sides of Chicago.
How will you address public health concerns such as contaminated drinking water, rat infestation, and lead poisoning?
First, the proposed public debate over the city’s response to the lead in Chicagoans drinking water was sidelined this past April by Alderman O’Connor. I will push for full publication and transparency of any data the city’s water department has on lead in Chicago’s water. Additionally, I will call for the city to replace both lead water mains and lead service lines, prioritizing those that are connected to schools and homes with young children.
How would you make Chicago a cleaner city with less waste and pollution?
Making Chicago a cleaner city with less waste and pollution starts with full transparency of the extent of the lead in Chicago’s water, and replacing both lead water mains and lead service lines, prioritizing those that are connected to schools and homes with young children. But environmental justice and addressing the climate crisis also includes divesting the city pension funds from fossil fuels, working for toxin-free communities across Chicago, and moving the city to non-carbon based electricity by 2030.
What would be your first steps for improving the transit system in terms of affordability, accessibility, and safety?
First, I would support establishing a 50 percent discounted CTA, Metra and Pace transit fare for low-income residents. Second, I support building over 100 miles of new on-street bikeways over the next four years, including at least 50 miles of protected bike lanes, and ensuring that there is prioritized funding prioritized for the city’s highest-crash corridors on the South and West Sides. Finally, I would push for the mayor to create $100 million in new annual revenues to increase bus availability by over 12%.
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See also
2019 Elections
External links
Footnotes
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