I received a parking ticket Friday night which I deserved. I saw the no parking sign and figured I would be back in time. But this morning as I went to the citys website to pay it....I got angry AGAIN about the parking meter deal. We got screwed...thats all there is to it. And it seems that we are not MAD about it....Where did the money for the deal go? While this city constantly cries broke, the politicians make more and more corrupt deals. Here is an article that came out in 2013. We have to do something about the mayor, but the aldermen, all of them, are screwing us too...as if you didnt know. Oh by the way, the toll on the Skyway is increasing. #atleastlubemebeforeyouscrewme On Privatization’s Cutting Edge … Everyone, I suppose, dislikes parking meters. Chicagoans hate them even more. That’s because Mayor Richard M. Daley in 2008 struck a deal with the investment consortium Chicago Parking Meters LLC, or CPM, that included Morgan Stanley, Allianz Capital Partners and, yes, the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Abu Dhabi, to privatize our meters. The price of parking—and the intensity of enforcement—skyrocketed. The terms were negotiated in secret. City Council members got two days to study the billion-dollar, seventy-five-year contract before signing off on it. An early estimate from the Chicago inspector general was that the city had sold off its property for about half of what it was worth. Then an alderman said it was worth about four times what the city had been paid. Finally, in 2010, Forbes reported that in fact the city had been underpaid by a factor of ten. The deal, you see, is structured like this. Not only does CPM get the money its meters hoover up from the fine upstanding citizens of Chicago. It gets money even if the meters are not used. Each meter has been assigned a “fair market valuation.”If the City takes what is called a “reserve power adverse action”—that can mean anything from removing a meter because it impedes traffic flow, shutting down a street for a block party or discouraging traffic from coming into the city during rush hour—“CPM has the right to trigger an immediate payment for the entire loss of the meter’s fair market value over the entire life of the seventy-five-year agreement.” Shut down one meter that the market-valuation says makes twenty-two bucks a day, in other words, and the City of Chicago has to fork over a check for $351,000—six days a week (why six days? more on that later), fifty-two weeks in a year, times seventy-five—within thirty days. Very easily, Geoghegan points out, a single shut-down of parking in a chunk of the city—say, for something like a NATO summit Chicago hosted last year—“could be more than the original purchase price of the deal.”
Posted on: Sun, 02 Nov 2014 17:09:06 +0000
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