Jessica “Jesse” Maronto spends her workdays fixing Chicago’s traffic signals after crashes and emergencies. Now she wants to fix the way the city runs, and she has built her mayoral platform around an acronym: CONE.
The letters stand for her four campaign pillars: Chicagoans, Operations, Neighborhoods and Economy. Her proposals range from staggered staff hours at city payment windows to Oasis, a plan for pop-up grocery-ordering sites in empty storefronts in food deserts.
Her platform also lists youth support, education partnerships, term limits for politicians, help for new businesses, disability services, goal-driven budgets, investment valuation review, new revenue ideas and cost sharing with the wealthy.
Maronto said she has not asked anyone for endorsements. She described herself as part of a group of people sharing ideas before the ballot is set and said “it’s jumping the gun to ask people to endorse,” until voters know who is running.
Her campaign reported a $6,000 loan on Sept. 15 and a $5,000 contribution from IBEW Illinois on Sept. 23.
From 95th and Cicero and beyond
Maronto was born in Oak Lawn and grew up near 95th and Cicero. When she was in high school, her father moved the family to Michigan, where her great-grandparents had a farm and housing was more affordable, she said.
She attended Hackett Catholic Prep High School, then switched to Kalamazoo Central, a public school, for her senior year.
Not yet ready for college, Maronto went to trade school where she earned her journeyman classification through an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 131, a five-year program at the time.
She later earned an associate’s degree from Kalamazoo Valley Community College, then a bachelor’s in accountancy and a master’s in business administration from Western Michigan University, she said.
“My primary role is with the Chicago Dept. of Transportation and that is through IBEW Local 9; I am a traffic signal repairman,” Maronto said.
She is also vice chair of the Disability Forward CHI Employee Resource Group for people with disabilities, which is sponsored by the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities.
She said frustration with corporate greed pushed her toward work with nonprofits and small businesses, and that same frustration drives her run for mayor.
“When you see people living in the ‘for me’, for what can I get out of this instead of people living for a purpose and serving, it makes you want to take action,” she said. “Not everybody can speak up for themselves.”
C: Chicagoans
Maronto said the city discloses information without explaining it and sometimes relies on poorly collected data.
“People believe that they are being transparent by disclosing something but they don’t give people the entire picture,” she said.
Residents now have about an eight-hour daytime window to pay bills or handle city business in person, she said, and she would expand those hours.
“People in the city work different hours. We have to start accommodating the people, coming to them with different options instead of just one solution,” Maronto said. “We continuously get stadium-sized solutions for things that need to be in our neighborhoods.”
Her first fix would stagger existing staff so offices stay open longer with smaller crews.
“You don’t have to change the budget at all to do things like that,” she said, though she added that some security costs might need adjusting.
Maronto tied service hours to the city’s uncollected debt. Residents living paycheck to paycheck, or using online-only banks whose cards may not work with city systems, may not be able to pay the way the city requires, she said.
She also wants a citywide day of service for city employees, with no penalty for taking part and more lifestyle accommodations for city workers.
“If we don’t take care of them first, they can’t go out there and take care of the rest of Chicago,” she said.
O: Operations
Maronto said city departments are not required to work together and municipal codes let each department set its own practices. She wants a more streamlined, citywide system for communication and processes.
She described the city’s underlying structures as transactional.
“A lot of our problems stem from people believing that they can’t change the patronage system, that they can’t change when they believe that somebody has an alderman or someone else in their corner,” she said.
She described a patchwork of software networks across departments and wants regular check-ins borrowed from business practice, starting with “… doing your annual inventory reset where you are really evaluating what you have, what you spent on and what you need.
Overall, city systems need to “… switch from the end-of-year push to a more distributed system where we are holding each department to different task work each month to be able to get to the end of the year,” she said.
About employee lifestyle accommodations, non-union managers and administrators also often work around the clock without breaks, Maronto said.
“I think that there needs to be some mandatory weekends off that does not mean [taking] their vacation and sick time,” she said.
N: Neighborhoods
Maronto said police officers need better training and enough sleep between shifts so they and the public stay safe. Officers she has talked to describe heated situations and heavy criticism, she said.
She said police vacations get canceled for big events the city knows about in advance.
“These are situations we put our officers in,” Maronto said. “This is not just about what they’re choosing to do.”
The pressure on police comes from policies and administrative burdens at the department level, she said.
“We should be planning in advance for this,” Maronto said.
She said she supports police because they do their job.
Overtime and pensions
Maronto argued that paying overtime is not always the wrong choice.
“Overtime is pay today,” Maronto said. “If we hire more people, that is the pension cost in the future.”
She said she rarely hears discussion of how long employees stay in a position or how that shapes future pension costs.
“So you have an option,” she said. “It could be more economically sound for us to spend overtime sometimes. Are there people abusing the overtime system? 100%. We know that.”
She said that abuse comes from a small minority and that changing the city’s culture would curb it.
Chicago youth
Maronto, who was a young mother herself, called for more investment in young people and young parents.
“It is much cheaper for us to invest in people’s futures while they’re young than it is for us to invest in the prison system and policing people when they’re older,” she said.
She also said the city lacks enough mental health providers and that insurance, including coverage for city employees, does not cover enough.
Food deserts
Oasis is a project Maronto launched and it is also her campaign’s answer to food deserts in city neighborhoods.
“Oasis is a program that we’re working on and that we will be doing a call-out to other people to work on with us,” Maronto said.
The plan would use empty storefronts from a land bank or local landlords. Local grocers would rotate in weekly and send staff to help residents order groceries, which would be delivered to the site, she said.
Maronto said she hopes the best available price could apply automatically, though that would have to be negotiated with grocers.
“This allows people to be able to use their WIC card, to use their Illinois Link card to utilize coupons and still order online with somebody helping them,” she said.
The sites could also host barbers offering back-to-school haircuts and serve as warming and cooling centers, she said.
The name is deliberate, Maronto said, “… because what you do at an oasis [is] you meet different people. You stop somewhere to rest, you learn something.”
E: Economy
Maronto said high post-pandemic building costs and thin margins discourage builders from putting up affordable homes.
She wants the city to work with designers on ready-made house plans, as was done with Chicago bungalows long ago, so builders could adapt new homes to vacant lots and save on design costs. She said she supports architects but they are expensive.
She also favors revitalizing vacant properties because “… the longer we leave these gray stones with leaky roofs and windows boarded up, the harder it is because it’s a bigger gut job.”
“We need to incentivize Chicago builders who live in the city instead of just any builder [from] anywhere,” she said.
The city should not run these programs itself but should connect businesses and organizations, Maronto said. Her proposed Sister Wards program would group aldermen in sets of five to share culture and mentoring across wards, connecting residents, aldermen and the mayor on housing and other issues.
“It needs to be about empowering the people, empowering the businesses and creating these partnerships that allow them to be successful; that we are supporting and connecting them so that people can actually get to each other,” she said.
Trains and a Southwest Side police district
Maronto said she sat through long freight-train backups when growing up on the Southwest Side.
Asked about a proposal to split the 8th Police District so police, fire and EMT crews are not stuck for hours at crossings blocked by stopped freight trains, she said, “We need to actually do something about it.”
She blamed administrative logjams and poor communication.
“I know I’ve heard this on the news but the fact that we’re still not addressing it does bother me,” she said. “This is just somebody not communicating with somebody else [about] how life-threatening this could be.”
Temporary fixes stall the real work, she said.
“Once something gets temporarily fixed in the city, then people stop working on it, and they say, ‘Oh, we’ll get to that later,’ or, ‘We’ll find money for it in the budget,’ but they don’t,” Maronto said.
‘No politricks’
Maronto’s campaign tagline is “Strong foundations for strong Chicago. No politricks.”
She said the second half is a promise to leave behind “the system that allowed us to be stuck with bad deals, like the parking meters that were a constant conversation. That also means that strong foundations is what the city is supposed to build for the people. We are the behind the scenes. We are your stage crew. We are the people bringing things in and taking things out and making sure you have everything. We are not the front-facing people, the Chicagoans are. That is the old Chicago that we are moving beyond.”