On March 5, Mayor Rahm Emanuel issued a press release boasting that motorists in Chicago had saved millions of dollars in parking meter fees thanks to the deal he renegotiated last year with the company that owns the meters.
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.
Shortly after being elected, Emanuel said he was looking into retooling the parking meter deal or scrapping it. Once in office, he continued to rail against the deal and blame it on Daley. But at the same time he instructed city lawyers to defend it in court against a lawsuit challenging its legality. His move effectively killed the effort by attorney Clint Krislov and the IVI-IPO, a public-interest group, to have the deal nullified on constitutional grounds.
In the spring of 2013, just before the new deal came to the council for a vote, Emanuel aides produced a Navigant report that said that the mayor was right: motorists would indeed feed less money into the system thanks to the renegotiated deal.
“These changes will provide much needed relief from this horrible deal,” Emanuel said at the time. He went on to thank the council for making “a little lemonade out of this lemon.”
Basically, the chief finding of Navigant’s latest report is that its original report was off target.
