New kind of fray for Tresser

Activist, teacher jumps into county board prez race

10/28/2009 10:00 PM

By IAN FULLERTON
Contributing Reporter

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Tom Tresser

Still warm from a victory against the Chicago 2016 bid team, No Games Chicago leader Tom Tresser has declared he is running for Cook County board president.

“If I have the privilege to be elected to that office, I can promise you a few things: We will have accountability, transparency, creativity and innovation in our government and we will have world class professional service because you, the tax payers, deserve it,” Tresser told a group of just over a dozen supporters who came to hear the announcement on a recent Saturday in Greektown.

The run for Todd Stroger’s seat will be a political first for Tresser, 57, who has been at the fore of several civic battles over the past few years. A civics instructor at DePaul University, Tresser is running on the Green Party ticket.

Tresser recently led the fight against the unsuccessful bid to bring the Olympics to Chicago in 2016. Prior to his stint with No Games, he was a co-founder of Protect Our Parks, the group that protested the lease of a Chicago Park District field in Lincoln Park to the Latin School of Chicago.

His political inexperience, Tresser said, was not a necessarily a shortcoming.

“It’s true that I don’t have any experience giving my cousins jobs and hiring low-ball contractors,” he said,” but what I do have experience in is running creative organizations and solving problems with collaborative efforts.”


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