To inform voters and to help the baiduhai Editorial Board make endorsements, the board posed a series of questions to the candidates running for alderman. See their answers below. See how other candidates answered here.
Name: Steve Botsford
Ward: 43rd
Current job: I work for my family’s small business. We develop industrial outside storage facilities. We currently operate three different sites, one in Hartford, CT, one in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, and one in San Bernardino.
Previous political experience: I have never held elected or appointed office.
Education: BA in Economics from the University of Notre Dame MA in Applied Economics from Georgetown University MBA in Finance and Marketing from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management
Spouse’s occupation: N/A
Sources of outside income: Own interests in real estate LLCs operating industrial outside storage facilities in North Hollywood and San Bernardino, California.
The rise in violent crime remains a top priority for City Hall. Homicides, shootings and carjackings are all unacceptably high. Tell us how city government can be innovative in combating crime, and explain what measures you would propose if elected.
Ending our current crime surge is my number one priority going into City Council. While difficult, I do not believe these problems are intractable. To solve this, we must look across the country and abroad to follow the best practices of cities that have found data-driven ways to reduce crime. This requires a holistic solution that spans from innovative ideas like collecting and registering the DNA of convicted felons to investing in our detective units so that we can solve more shooting crimes and end the cycle of retaliatory violence.
The most important thing we can do as a city to halt our crime crisis is to more shooting crimes. In 2020, Chicago only cleared 44.5% of homicides; this number includes clearing homicides where the suspect was identified but was either dead or couldn’t be prosecuted, and the clearance rate for non-fatal shootings is even lower. Link Available At Request Available At Request The lack of accountability for shooting crimes gives criminals impunity to continue their violence, deters community members from giving witness accounts to police, and incites retaliatory violence from victims and their close ones. To stop this deadly cycle, we need to hire more detectives to solve these crimes and start beating back the crime surge. Studies from Phoenix have proven that the more officers you assign to investigate murders, the higher likelihood you have of solving the crime.
Our solutions must be holistic, and while investing in our police is a necessity, we also need to invest in our mental health professionals. Every 911 call should not be responded to with armed force. This is effective since mental health professionals are often more adept at responding to these issues since criminal offenders are 5-7x more likely to suffer from mental health issues. Link Available At Request Available At Request. A similar program in Denver, according to a recent report, has since 2020 “deployed medical and behavioral health clinicians to respond to over 2,200 low-risk calls reporting trespassing, intoxication, or mental health crises involving poverty, homelessness or addiction. In all that time, STAR teams have never called for police back-up due to a safety issue, according to their January report.” Link Available At Request Available At Request By utilizing the skills of our mental health professionals, we can deescalate situations and focus our police force on patrolling crime hot spots.
We must also look for innovative solutions, like collecting and registering the DNA of convicted felons, where recent studies Link Available At Request Available At Request have shown that doing so in Denmark has led to a 42% decrease in the probability of a new conviction. This is accomplished by deterring past felons from committing crimes once getting released and making it easier for police to catch repeat offenders.
We must also work to expand the summer jobs program, eliminate lead water pipes, increase funding for anti-violence groups, green vacant lots, increase street lighting and institute mandatory sobriety for drug abusers who commit crimes. Studies show all of these work to lower crime rates and should be integral parts of our crime reduction tool kit.
The CTA, one of the nation’s largest transit systems, remains a troubled agency grappling with issues ranging from violent crime and ghost buses and trains, to flagging ridership. Give us your thoughts on what specific measures CTA should take to make train and bus service safer, more reliable and more equitable for Chicagoans.
Our city’s transit system is imperative for giving opportunities to residents from all of our 77 neighborhoods the ability to work anywhere in the city and bypass a soul-crushing or wallet-busting commute. The CTA is currently failing at this integral task, and reforming this will be pivotal to ensure the long-term success of Chicago. To do so, we need to; invest in security to attract new riders, become more efficient so that our limited dollars go further, and we need a housing policy that incentivizes new transit riders.
The level of crime in our transit system is unacceptable. Chicagoans should never feel that taking public transit puts their safety at risk. The private security on CTA is not getting the job done, as stories about crime victims continue to pour in. We must divert those resources start hiring new CPD officers that can effectively maintain order on our transit systems. We should also install panic buttons at all CTA stations, this will both deter criminals and decrease response times of CPD officers should criminal activity occur.
Improving Chicago’s bus system is key to increasing public transit ridership and reducing traffic. Most cities design bus networks to maximize the number of routes and stops. To increase efficiency, we need to prioritize ridership and do so by increasing the frequency of buses. If our goal was to cut wait times by a third with our current bus networks, we would have to triple our supply of buses which would be very costly and add to traffic congestion. Instead, we must prioritize high-frequency bus lines and eliminate our worst-performing bus lines while also consolidating lines that move in similar directions. This will increase ridership as we continue to increase the frequency of buses and lower commute times. Increasing ridership will, in turn, allow us to invest more in our buses, setting us on a positive cycle of transit improvement.
America is a global leader in many things, but when it comes to transit ridership, commute times, and the cost of building new transit, we find ourselves far behind our peer countries. We should try to emulate their examples by staffing our transit agencies with foreign experts who are experienced in building and maintaining a world-class transit system. America ranks as the 6th most expensive country in the world to build rail infrastructure. Hiring managers from countries successful in building cost-effective transit is an excellent first step in reducing our costs. We also need to be streamlining the process for our transit agencies to get permits and close construction areas to traffic.
I believe our housing policy can also drive new users to our transit system by building more housing developments near transit hubs and eliminating parking requirements for any new developments. Both of these will increase the ridership of our transit system, allowing us to continue to invest in making it world-class.
Ten years ago, enrollment at Chicago Public Schools was 403,000 students. In September, enrollment stood at 322,000 students. Enrollment at CPS has dropped for 11 consecutive years. What specific measures should CPS undertake to reverse the trend of ever-dwindling enrollment?
The falling enrollment for Chicago Public Schools is a prime example of people voting with their feet. We must reform our school system so that our public schools are among the best in the nation. To do so, we should reform how we pay our teachers so that excellence in the classroom is prioritized over the length of tenure. We need to expand upon our great magnet school system, and we need to utilize our best-performing public charter schools.
Ten years ago, Washington, D.C. enacted significant education reform measures that sought to pay bonuses to the most effective teachers in the system and make it easier for administrators to fire the worst-performing teachers. Teacher retention rates improved, specifically higher among the best-rated teachers, student test scores rose, public school attendance increased, the applicant pool got more diverse, and newer hires were higher rated than the average teacher in the system. Under this new system, the results show that only 1% of the teachers were found to be genuinely ineffective, and 96% of those ineffective teachers were fired. Scholars studying this program found when those ineffective teachers left the system, student achievement rose by 0.14 standard deviations in reading and 0.21 standard deviations in math.
According to the US News, five of the best ten high schools in Illinois are in Chicago. All of which are public, selective enrollment magnet schools. We need to expand upon these schools so that more Chicagoans can benefit from these high-performing institutions. Whitney Young, which ranks #4 in the state rankings, recently had 16,000 students apply and only had the opportunity to enroll 400 students. The demand for this type of education is there, and Chicago owes it to its young students to find a way to match the supply.
Public charter schools are given more flexibility in their operation, and thus we should expect superior results. We must ensure rigorous authorizers do not allow public charter schools to underperform their non-charter counterparts. But while we must close ineffective charter schools, we must expand upon our best-performing public charter schools. Researchers have found that urban charter schools produce higher scores on state-level exams, higher college admission test scores, and both higher enrollment and scores in advanced placement courses. When Cory Booker was the mayor of Newark between 2006-2013, one of his goals was to make Newark the “charter-school capital of the nation.” Newark students who had previously ranked in the 38 percentiles in statewide tests had improved by 40 points. On top of that, studies of Newark, like many other studies, have shown that the expansion of charter schools has not come at the detriment of traditional public schools. As can be expected, higher levels of competition in the education sector helped charter and non-charter students alike.
Sometimes we can find education improvements in unlikely areas, some of which would include improving our school’s air conditioning and filtering systems. A 2019 study found, “Without air-conditioning, a 1 degrees F hotter school year reduces that year’s learning by one percent”. Link Available At Request Available At Request In addition to temperature, researchers have found that air quality also harms student learning. An interesting example of such is that randomized research from chess tournaments should that wrong chess moves increase as air quality decreases.
Disinvestment on the South and West sides is a decades-long problem with myriad causes. Give us at least one innovative idea that you believe could play a role in reversing South and West side disinvestment, and explain why the idea is realistic and feasible.
Chicago cannot thrive unless all of our 77 neighborhoods thrive together. Buttressing economic growth in our South and West sides will be a priority of mine to ensure all Chicagoans have a shot at a better life. One of the keys to economic growth is small businesses, and I intend to make Chicago one of the easiest cities in the country for an entrepreneur to start a small business. This starts with a one-stop permitting shop to reorient the city away from building walls to entrepreneurship and instead fostering it. But we must also attack the second biggest barrier to entrepreneurship on the South and West sides, and that is access to capital. I intend to create an independent Entrepreneur Backed Assets (EBA) fund to tackle this problem. By bundling small business loans together, we both give those seeking safer assets an avenue to invest in Chicago’s small businesses but also incentivize credit unions and local banks to make these loans knowing that there will be a market for them. By easing the capital contrasts our entrepreneurs face; we can unlock economic opportunities across the South and West side.
Our city government should make it easier for small business owners to continue their operations and for soon-to-be small business owners to get themselves into the game. We need to lower the barrier to entry and continue operations for our city’s entrepreneurs to do this. Chicago needs to create a one-stop permitting ship to assist Chicagoans in business regulation, licensing, and permitting issues. A single office that can spearhead these permitting needs will help small business owners focus their time and effort on creating value for their customers instead of getting weighed down by jumping through bureaucratic hoops. This new agency should also have a digital aspect so that business owners can gain the necessary permits as quickly as ordering something on Amazon. Cities like Miami and Kansas City are already working on this front, and we cannot allow them to sprint ahead of us.
Often what separates a business owner from a would-be business owner is the initial capital to start the business or to keep it afloat. Loans for small businesses are risky, and the current lending environment does not have enough supply to meet the current demand. Chicago should facilitate markets to spur this economic lifeline. Chicago should create an independent Entrepreneur Backed Assets (EBA) fund to tackle this problem. This fund would create a secondary market for loans generated by community-based lenders, like local credit unions and banks. The fund could purchase these loans and bundle them together in a portfolio that would carry far less risk than these loans do individually, allowing the lenders in our communities to increase the funding they can offer. The city could also invest some of its resources into the EBA to magnify its lending power.
Across our city, there are far too many vacant storefronts. Not only do we need to make it easier for business owners to set up shop in these properties, but we also need to incentivize landowners to seek out new tenants and incentivize them to have flexibility in bringing in new businesses. Often, landowners have clauses in their contracts with their lenders that make it more profitable to receive rebates for empty buildings instead of settling for slightly lower rents.
At the beginning of the technology boom, Boston competed with Silicon Valley to attract top talent and budding startups. While both areas were hotbeds due to their educated workforce and top-tier universities, Silicon Valley pulled ahead in the race, with many accounting for some of that difference to California’s banning of non-compete clauses. This not only attracted more workers to the area without the fear of being locked out of their desired industry should they wish to change jobs. But the talent diffusion amongst different firms spurred knowledge dissemination and increased competition between firms, has been a windfall for workers and established Silicon Valley as the envy of the business world. Chicago should follow suit and work to ban non-compete clauses, thus empowering our workforce and creating a dynamic business environment that will propel the next generation of Chicago-based startups.
Do you support giving Chicagoans property tax relief? If yes, please explain how you would accomplish it. If no, please explain why not.
Yes, we must find a way to stop pushing residents out of our city due to ever-increasing property taxes. We need to find ways to trim budgets so that we can restore Chicago to fiscal stability. We need to give long-term stability to our pension system by ensuring that new employees are on a pension schedule that is actually achievable. We must end frivolous programs like paying for people’s gas to score political points. When politicians are able to use the city budget to reward their political cronies and advance their chances at re-election, unconnected Chicagoans are always left with the bill.
Above all, we must get rid of the corruption that allows our alderman to benefit from our broken property tax system. When our laws are written by property tax attorneys, it is no wonder that budgets never achieve stability and property taxes continue on their never-ending upward trend. Chicagoans are thus forced to pay a corruption tax; we need ethics reform, so alderman are no longer allowed to maintain a second job that lobbies the government or handles property tax appeals.
Give us your take on the city’s use of tax increment financing districts. Do you feel they have been useful, or do you feel that the problems associated with them outweigh their usefulness? What if any reforms would you want to apply to the city’s usage of TIFs?
The TIF system has often lacked transparency and is used to give political favors as opposed to serving as a tool for economic growth across our city. I think we need to ensure that the primary goal of TIF districts is to increase economic growth and bring in new jobs, with a focus on the South and West sides which have not enjoyed as much economic growth as other areas of the city. I do not believe that TIF money should go to luxury developments such as the newly approved Casino but should instead focus on how we increase the economic growth for all of our 77 neighborhoods. While I applaud some of Mayor Lightfoot’s transparency reforms, more must be done so citizens can ensure these developments are for community benefit by increasing the transparency of the TIF district beneficiaries, including the actual corporate parent and the political donations those groups have given to city officials.
Lead in drinking water is a major health concern for the city. It is estimated that in Chicago there are roughly 400,000 homes and small apartment buildings with lead service lines. So far, the city has replaced less than 300 lead service lines. Do you feel the pace of lead service line replacement should be expedited, and if yes, what is the best, most feasible way to accomplish that?
Studies have shown that “Cities that used lead pipes had homicide rates 24 percent higher than those without lead pipes, on average; places with more acidic water saw bigger increases.” This result is specifically dangerous for boys who “just a 1-unit increase in blood-lead levels increased the likelihood of a school suspension by 6 percent, and the likelihood of being detained in a juvenile correctional facility (a relatively rare event) by 57 percent.” Link Available at Request Knowing the link between lead water pipes and crime in our city, the removal of these pipes should be a top priority. In September 2020, Mayor Lightfoot committed to removing 650 pipes by the end of 2021; as of September 2022, just 154 lead pipes have been removed. These results are unacceptable, and if the current leadership of the Department of Water Management cannot come up with a feasible plan to get these pipes removed in a timely manner, then they should be replaced. This plan should include an all-of-the-above strategy that comprises city workers, private sector workers, and subsidies for homeowners and landlords to navigate this process themselves. We cannot allow another generation of Chicagoans to be poisoned by our current system.
If you are an incumbent, please explain what is it about your service on the City Council that makes you most qualified for the job. If you have never served on the council, please explain what is it about your background that makes you most qualified.
Chicago has serious problems, from crime to lack of affordable housing, to residents fleeing for the suburbs and better job markets, to businesses relocating to tax-friendly states. We need an alderman that is focused on developing legislative solutions to these macro problems. As a staffer working on Capitol Hill, I was able to develop unique solutions to our nation’s problems and was always able to create bipartisan coalitions around those solutions, even in an environment as partisan and divided as Washington. I will bring that policy-making experience along with my economics educational background to the city council and help rewrite our laws to combat crime and increase economic growth.
What is the most pressing issue facing the people of your ward, and how would you address it?
Crime is clearly one of the biggest problems facing Chicago today. Beyond the fact that one of a government’s most essential roles in society is protecting its citizens, our crime issue exacerbates our city’s other biggest problems. How can children be expected to succeed in the classroom if they walk to and from school in fear of being harmed? How are citizens not expected to leave for the suburbs if they feel their city government can’t protect them? How are companies supposed to relocate and bring new jobs to our city if their employees fear the city of Chicago? We must make solving our crime issue a priority number one and be willing to make whatever investments or changes necessary to bring peace to Chicago.
If we are going to bring this much-needed peace to our city, we will have to increase funding to law enforcement so that they can adequately investigate crimes and see that those guilty parties are fairly punished. We need to invest more in mental health professionals and violence prevention groups because our crime problem requires a holistic solution. We are also going to need to invest more so our police can monitor hotbeds of crime because, with much of our shootings being retaliatory, stopping one incidence of gun violence can have cascading effects.
Sum up why should voters elect you and not your opponent(s)? (Please limit this to policy and approach, not a biography recitation.)
Chicago needs serious policymakers to solve the serious problems throughout our city. Obviously, all alderman are stewards of their wards who need to perfect the blocking and tackling of ward management like trash pickup, street repair, and trying to find ways to eliminate rats. But if Chicago is going to end our current crime surge, reform our education system so that our students are fully prepared for the needs of tomorrow’s workforce, and foster a dynamic economy that will serve as a model and a growth engine for the nation, we are going to need innovative policymakers. We are going to need serious policymakers that will focus on ensuring all of Chicago thrives together and not just try to build a protectionist wall around their own ward.
We are going to need serious policymakers that work with the mayor to enact change but not be a rubber stamp for their entire agenda. We are going to need policymakers who use this office as a means to better the city, not as a stepping stone to a Congressional seat or reality television show gig. We are going to need serious policymakers who know that to stop a crime, we need to attack root causes while investing in our police force, not the implementation of a 50-year-old whistle program. We are going to need policymakers with integrity, not those who use loopholes in campaign finance laws to use their wealth to buy an election without having any real skin in the game.
I believe that my agenda will ensure that all Chicagoans live on safe streets, send their children to innovative schools, and benefit from the dynamic economy that we will build.