Cook County
Toni Preckwinkle is the 35th president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, an office she has held since 2010. A dedicated and effective public servant, President Preckwinkle has worked tirelessly and collaboratively to reshape County government through increased fiscal responsibility, transparency and improved services. As the top executive in Cook County, President Preckwinkle oversees one of the nation’s largest public health and hospitals systems and one of the nation’s largest criminal justice systems. President Preckwinkle is a lifelong advocate for equity and equality, and through her work as president, has fought to improve health care access, bring increased fairness to the criminal justice system and expand employment training opportunities for some of the County’s most disadvantaged youth. Leveraging more than 30 years of political experience and leadership, President Preckwinkle has restored credibility to County government, solving for more than $2.1 billion in budget deficits, cutting $851 million in expenditures and passing balanced budgets each year of her tenure. Through the President’s leadership, Cook County used the Affordable Care Act to create CountyCare, a managed care program for Medicaid-eligible residents which now has about 330,000 members. President Preckwinkle is a nationally recognized leader in the drive to reduce unnecessary and costly detention of non-violent offenders in the criminal justice system. The pretrial population at the Cook County Jail has been reduced by more than 30 percent since she took office in 2010 and in 2017, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Cook County one of its highly competitive Safety and Justice grants in recognition of the County’s progress in criminal justice reform and to support its continued efforts. At the same time President Preckwinkle has successfully fought for juvenile justice reform, reducing the number of children tried as adults and the population in the Juvenile Temporary Detention.
