“By delivering on free Sunday parking in the neighborhoods,” Emanuel said in a statement, “we’re able to make a bad deal better.”
It sounded great—who doesn’t want to send less of our money to the wealthy investors who control the meters?
But a report attached to the press release—prepared by Navigant, a consultant to the city—doesn’t prove anything of the sort. It’s the latest example of Emanuel claiming he improved the unpopular deal—though he actually may have made it worse.
In case you’ve tried to forget, it was December 2008 when the City Council, at the urging of former mayor Richard M. Daley, voted to lease the city’s 36,000 parking meters to Chicago Parking Meters Inc., a consortium of investors led by Morgan Stanley.
The best way to think of the deal is as a loan. The consortium agreed to lend the city, struggling with unpaid bills, about $1.2 billion. In exchange the city agreed to pay back the consortium with 75 years of revenues from those meters.
Not surprisingly, the deal was unpopular with the public, if for no other reason than that the council also gave CPM permission to jack up the parking rates from 25 cents an hour to $2 an hour in most of the city, and to as much as $6.50 an hour downtown.