Chicago! bring your coins and severed hands.
No offense to cancer.
There are 2 words that really irritate a certain segment of Chicagoans – “Triple Homicide?” No. “Class Size?” Sorry. “Kellen Davis?” close.
“Parking Meters”
Ever since Mayor Daley disastrously leased the city’s parking meters to a Goldman Sachs’ subsidiary for some quick cash, the deal has been appropriately derided as an unmitigated disaster. Some have looked to mitigate said disaster. Rahm says ‘no!’
At issue was a 2009 lawsuit filed by attorney Clint Krislov on behalf of the IVI-IPO, a public-interest group. The suit argued that the deal illegally privatized the government’s right to set parking and traffic policy and restricted the options of future city officials.
But the city teamed with Chicago Parking Meters LLC, the company that controls the parking system, to contest the suit, even after Mayor Emanuel publicly vowed to pursue every avenue he could to get out of the agreement.
Shocker. Rahm runs a campaign criticizing deal + vows to rectify situation, gets elected, then the Democratic Machine’s Privatization Czar stays true to himself by being a double-dealing-deadbeat-dick. It’s like an episode of Boss, but we don’t even get to see a topless Claire from 90210.
The city’s position proved to be pivotal. Judge Richard J. Billik Jr. ruled that the citizens who brought the suit couldn’t show they were personally harmed by the meter deal. If anyone was hurt by it, Billik said, it would be the city. Yet city attorneys agreed with CPM that the government and its constituents were benefiting, primarily through new meter pay boxes and the $1.2 billion in cash paid into city coffers up front.
It’s cool. It’s cool. Rahm has the cure for the urban blight that ails ya. I’ve always said Chicago needs a little bit of Hammond. Jackpot!
As much as I dislike defending a man I was continually frustrated with as Obama’s chief of staff, I find your unrelenting criticism of Rahm as Mayor, including this one, just to be one nitpick after another. As if you and John Kass and Mick Dumke are conspiring late night at the Billy Goat sharing stories of Chicago corruption over coffee and goat meat.
This lack of prosecution doesn’t have much legs. Earlier this year, the mayor’s office had ordered its own outside audit of Parking Meters LLC and stopped payment on more than $14 million worth of receipts. To charge that the mayor’s office isn’t serious about scrutinizing every aspect they have contractual grounds to scrutinize is disingenuous and denies the other efforts the mayor’s office is making. To state that they’re somehow in cahoots, simply because they didn’t party with this public interest group, belies the efforts they have made. Furthermore, what incentive does the mayor’s office have to collude with the Parking Meter’s group now that the ink on the contract is dry and they’re an adversary? Maybe there’s something there but I don’t see it.
No doubt, the deal the former mayor struck was a shitty deal, for 2 simple reasons – either the city should have gotten a ton more $ for the contract or the deal shouldn’t have been struck at all. No one thinks it was a good deal. But what just about every critic somehow overlooks is that the city had a huge budget shortfall that had to be addressed. No way around it. Was it short-sighted and lazy? Yes. The mayor took the easy way out instead of either fighting hard to get a much better deal or taking the politically unpopular steps to find other revenue streams. But without that windfall, we’d be fucked to a much greater degree than our city budget already is (although the city has substantial progress in addressing this over the last 2 years).
And that’s what Mayor Emmanuel explains when asked about this – “But to deal with that, you have to have a billion bucks.” And NO ONE comes up with an explanation for how to get around that. And I think that’s what you’re doing here – assuming the mayor’s office should have took party to this lawsuit without knowing if it was a promising route to take. Show me a valid way to get out of this contract the mayor isn’t pursuing and I’ll start believing maybe he has some ulterior motives.
Call me naive but, for whatever faults Emmanuel displayed as chief of staff or in his earlier roles as congressman and part of Clinton’s staff, I’m exceedingly grateful he’s our mayor. Chicago can’t afford the likes of a Gerry Chicco running our world class city. For better or worse, he’s competent, so was Mayor Daley. And I’ll take competence and experience and knowing how to pull the levers of government over ideological purity any day. That competence is the reason Chicago stands distinguished on the world stage and didn’t fall victim to the irrecoverable decline so many other midwestern, rustbelt cities did. The blemishes on the city are many, no doubt, but it’s still at city that works.
Fool Me Once…
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/city-hall-privatization-includes-sponsorships-of-cta-stops-and-sale-of-billboards/Content?oid=8182708