Jeff Smith Endorsed for 18th District State Representative

Written by: Sandra Verthein on Aug 9, 2009 6:14 PM EDT

Linked to groups: Northside DFA, Chicago-Goose Island, Loop DFA, DFA-Evanston North Shore

UPDATE: At our September meeting Jeff Smith's campaign was "adopted" with a unanimous vote. An "adoption" means our group will be committing its resources to the campaign.

At the August 6th Northside Democracy for America (NDFA) meeting Democrat Jeff Smith was endorsed for State Representative by a vote of 41 to 1. Jeff is running to represent Illinois 18h District, a seat currently held by Julie Hamos who will not be running for re-election so she can run for Congress.

To sign up for campaign emails go to:
http://www.electjeffsmith.org/

To donate to Jeff's campaign via our Northside DFA Act Blue page go to:
http://www.actblue.com/page/ndfa2010

Jeff Smith is an experienced community leader who has done the hard work of fighting for change. In his decades-long record of activism he has run -- and won -- against a Democratic machine incumbent, helped elect reform candidates like Abner Mikva, Harold Washington, Paul Simon, Barack Obama and Mike Quigley, and worked for causes from habitat restoration to affordable housing. He has volunteered thousands of hours at local schools and with community groups including:

Jeff and his wife Nancy have two children who graduated from Evanston public schools.  Jeff is a graduate of Northwestern University and Harvard Law School and has worked for the past 18 years as an Evanston-based attorney assisting community residents with their legal needs.

Jeff's priorities for state government include:

- Real ethics reform to end the pervasive culture of curruption in the state capital and return control of our government to the people.
- A fairer budget and budgeting process that faces up to fiscal reality, targets waste, preserves needed social services, and provides transparency in spending.
- Transportation policies that improve our environment, reduce congestion, expand public transit, and increase access to employment.
- School funding reform so we can prepare all children for the future.

Jeff is a prolific writer on numerous areas of public policy.  Here is an excerpt from a piece that Jeff wrote in June about the Illinois budget:

"What Illinois has, and would have no matter who is governor, is this: (1) a structural deficit, because our current tax structure just doesn't generate enough to fund the total state budgets and pension obligations at the rate we spend; (2) years of avoiding this through creative accounting such as fund sweeps and, in effect, using the pension funds as a credit card; (3) an overall tax system that is regressive, and arguably one of the more regressive in the nation; and (4) a huge revenue shortfall due to the recessionary economy, which has dramatically lowered revenues from income, from sales, and from the transfer of real estate. This last is what tipped the deeply troubling into the truly alarming."

Here is a sampling of some of his other recent writings:

- Transportation and high speed rail funding
- A brief entry about the economics of privitization
- An article discussing the Il Legislatures "reform" bill and why he would have voted against it in a straight up-or-down vote
- A report on the Windpower 2009 expo which he attended
- Article on the effect of the economic crises on artists
- Article on mass transit funding
- Article against continued war funding
- Thoughts about the bailout
- The "Six Emergencies" facing our next Senator

In 1986, at age 29, Jeff successfully challenged the incumbent chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party, and served for 4 years as Democratic State Central Committeeman for the 9th Congressional District, then represented by Sid Yates. The Illinois Democratic party, under the late Chairman Vince Demuzio, helped rebuild the downstate and suburban organization, and Illinois swung back into the Democratic column in 1992.

In 1988, while committeeman, Jeff received almost a quarter-million Cook County votes as the reform candidate in a close special election for the Board of Tax Appeals, receiving strong support from north suburban, lakefront, and majority-black wards and townships, as well as many media, labor, good-government, and progressive-advocacy endorsements. Following his term as state committeeman, Jeff remained active in Democratic politics, serving as a ward chair and board member of the Democratic Party of Evanston, and running against machine politics as Evanston’s standard-bearer in a three-way race for the Cook County Board in 1994.

Most recently, Jeff was an early supporter of Barack Obama, supporting him in his 2004 race for the Senate, and traveling to St. Louis, Missouri for the last four days of the Obama campaign to volunteer as an election protection lawyer.  He wrote four detailed diaries about that experience.  You can read them here:

http://www.prairiestateblue.com/diary/4639/
http://www.prairiestateblue.com/diary/4640/
http://www.prairiestateblue.com/diary/4645/
http://www.prairiestateblue.com/diary/4649/

You can also see a video with some clips of Jeff's presentation to our group:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz1N5QV1O0c

Jeff would make an outstanding state representative. Let's send him to Springfield!

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Location: Chicago, IL 60640