How Chicago’s Environmental Committee Chair Works Toward a ‘Sustainable’ City

Last year, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson appointed Ald. Maria Hadden (49th) to chair the Committee on Environmental Protection and Energy, a key role in helping advance his environmental agenda. 

Since being appointed chair of the committee, Hadden pushed for the reinstatement of the Department of the Environment and decarbonizing buildings. Despite wins like establishing the new Department of the Environment, progress in the committee this year has been slow. A proposed ordinance to ban natural gas hookups in new buildings has been sitting in the Council’s Rules Committee since May. According to its 2022 Climate Action Plan, the city aimed to have an ordinance of this kind in place by 2023.

The Committee on Environmental Energy and Protection will hold a meeting on Tuesday. Before the committee will be an ordinance Hadden introduced that would establish a Chicago Shoreline Advisory Board and a resolution calling on U.S. Congress and federal agencies to strengthen and enforce national railroad safety standards to mitigate the risk of accidents and derailments.

Hadden spoke with Borderless about her priorities for the environment committee for the rest of year, the Clean and Affordable Buildings Ordinance, and working with other city decision-makers. This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Can you start by telling us how and why environmental justice became a key priority for you as an alderwoman? 

Living in the 49th Ward, I was connected with neighbors who were active in environmental justice work for a while, and I had points on environmental issues in my campaign, but it wasn’t a top priority. After getting elected for my first term, one of the first emergencies we faced was record-high Lake Michigan levels. After I was sworn in, I asked my chief of staff to schedule a meeting with whichever department in the city managed the lakefront because we were coming up on another fall storm season, and surely we should be preparing for it. I wanted to see the plan, but there was no governing body, so I met with a mix of agencies working in this general area of lakeshore management in some way, shape or form. They were all aware of the issue and eager to talk about it. I asked what the plan was. There were talks about a grant for a multi-year study to plan for the next 30 years, but who will pay attention to what happens in two or three months?  

It was easy to see these external events and make climate planning, environmental sustainability, and justice issues more of a priority because of the direct impact of kind the consequences of inaction on constituents’ lives, both constituents that I’m directly elected to represent and of course, constituents throughout the city of Chicago.

What are your priorities as chair of the environmental committee for the rest of this year?

For me, one of the things we’re looking to get before the end of this year is heat protection for outdoor workers. Excessive heat has become an increasingly significant issue. My team and I have been working for over a year on legislation for Chicago, and it’s important to get that passed and enacted so that we’re ready for the following summer. 

More broadly, we’re still working on building decarbonization. The Clean and Affordable Buildings Ordinance is not dead. Attention shifts as we get through budget priorities, and we won’t pass it before the end of the year, but we are still actively working on that. 

An even bigger piece of legislation is the work on community impacts. The Cumulative Impacts Assessment and the index were done last year, but we are still working with the Department of Environment and the Department of Public Health to help scale some of the broader work for that. Part of the support needed for that as we enter budget season is ensuring that we continue to support the growth of our Department of Environment.

The Clean and Affordable Buildings Ordinance currently sits in the rules committee. What needs to happen for it to move out of that committee? 

The big challenge is council support. It’s the type of meaningful work most challenging in legislative bodies; it’s very technical. The positive impacts we know we will see from it are cumulative and will take time to yield, so it’s a difficult thing to solve for decision-makers who often focus on the here and now. 

We held a hearing to help people understand why it is necessary. This is the crux of many inaction in legislative bodies around climate preparedness and climate emergency. People can’t think forward enough, or it can be hard to make those choices. So, a lot of it is still moving council. But the critical shift as our initial push on it freed some people to see the bigger picture, but not enough to pass. This one piece of legislation looks at putting carbon emissions guidelines on new construction, which would, in effect, eliminate the use of natural gas in new construction. In Chicago, the goal is not to ban natural gas. The goal is to make significant steps towards curbing our carbon emissions and helping us meet our goal for our climate action plan over the next 20 years. 

We’re also doing more than just the Cleaner and Affordable Buildings Ordinance. We’re pivoting to work with these departments to bring in the broader suite of policy action and to help get the broader city and the decision-makers to understand and buy into the broader climate action plan. That will make it easier for them to support the small steps and the individual pieces like the Clean and Affordable Building Ordinance. 

What would you like to see as part of a reinstated Department of the Environment moving forward?

I would like to see some growth in support staff. Right now, the Department of the Environment is still a small team. They are hiring to fill some current positions. Still, we need the staffing to work and support a lot of the policy work on the cumulative impacts ordinance and the Climate Action Plan. There is already a pathway and a plan for how we want to build this department over the next five years. In the immediate future, it’s about ensuring we get the budgetary commitments and resources to keep this department on track to building into the department we need. I’m excited about our department’s continued leadership and the team they’re building. 

What are people in your ward and other parts of the city telling you they want to see regarding environmental justice?

We have yet to receive budget requests this year, but some of the big things from previous years that we still have to work on are polluters and what the city is doing to hold people accountable. Often, that comes into the staffing power for inspections under the Department of Public Health. We want to grow that so that we can respond to people’s requests and enforce what codes we have. So that’s always a request.

As department chair, I also sit on our urban forestry advisory board, so we’ve continued work on tree canopy. This connects to many of our public health goals around environmental justice and some of our environmental and sustainability goals around building a more resilient city, addressing heat islands, and developing flooding mitigation plans. It tends to be an annual priority for people as well.

What initiatives in other cities or countries excite you that you might want to try here in Chicago?

We’re looking at policies and practices as the committee because I think Chicago has a lot of opportunities to grow and become a cleaner, healthier, sustainable, and resilient city. I’m excited to look at other cities in the United States and learn about advancements that other cities have made that Chicago can follow. Building decarbonization is certainly one of them, and the Bay Area and New York City are cities we can look at.

We would also like to have a hearing in September on what we could do better for bird-friendly architecture. We’ll review what our own intervention has yielded since passing legislation for partial protections for migratory birds in 2020, compare it to New York’s legislation and see what we can move forward in Chicago.

As we get into larger sustainability pieces, I’m also looking to cities outside the United States, like Bogota and Medellin, where there are more lessons to be learned. 

Lastly, on a more tangible piece, coming back from that conference, I flew through San Francisco Airport, where they don’t use single-use in their airport. And maybe that’s something we should look at for Chicago as well.

Aydali Campa is a Report for America corps member and covers environmental justice and immigrant communities for Borderless Magazine. Send her an email at aydali@borderlessmag.org