Find two Chicagoans, and you’ll find three different opinions. But one thing that unites the whole city is our anger over the terrible parking meter deal then-Mayor Richard M. Daley inked back in 2008.
After a 40-5 decision by the City Council, Daley turned over tens of thousands of parking spots to hungry investors with a 75-year lease. The city got a one-time payment of a little more than $1 billion, while the consortium, Chicago Parking Meters LLC, has already seen $2 billion in profit from Chicagoans, after less than 20 years into the deal. Payboxes went up in all 77 community areas, requiring that we pay for parking or get ticketed while boosting corporate profits instead of investment in city budgets.
With 57 years left to go, Chicagoans have already paid more than double what the city received in return.
Instead of learning from that lesson, Gov. JB Pritzker is pushing to repeat it. Imagine taking the rotten parking meter deal statewide. What’s been presented to all of us as a last-ditch effort to keep the McCaskeys, majority owners of the Bears, from moving the team across the state line is actually a tax rewrite that would include any major development in the state over $100 million. That includes rail lines in Granite City, new warehouses built by Jeff Bezos’ Amazon, a stadium for the Red Stars or another team, and any new corporate headquarters, whether in Chicago or a suburb.
Chicagoans have felt the impact of the parking meter deal firsthand. There’s not a driver I know who hasn’t encountered an orange envelope hanging from their car that contains a parking ticket. Despite the sale of city assets to investors — or maybe because of it — we’ve seen anemic city budgets unable to keep up with the needs our communities face.
The revenue from the deal goes to the investors behind Chicago Parking Meters LLC instead of being reinvested in our neighborhoods. At the same time, we’ve spent the past two decades fighting another boondoggle: keeping our tax dollars from being segregated into tax increment financing district funds that subsidize our city’s own mega-developers instead of going into schools, parks and libraries where they belong.
The megaprojects bill is the parking meter deal and TIF on steroids.
If you or I upgrade our curb appeal, create an addition or build a mother-in-law suite to our homes, the county assesses the new value, and we get hit with a higher tax bill the next year. But if you or I have the benefit of building a stadium or an Amazon warehouse, the megaprojects bill would let us skip any tax increase for the next generation, up to 40 years.
Proponents say it would incentivize development, but what it would do is rob schools and services of revenue and shift the responsibility of paying for local public institutions from big corporations to everyday homeowners.
We can create good jobs, invest in community and fund the schools our students deserve. In the latest Chicago Teachers Union contract, we won $10 million of investment in solar installations, this school year alone, that will improve the health of surrounding communities, create good trades jobs and improve schools for the students who attend them. That can be a model for how larger development moves forward in our state, not an outlier.
Right now, the governor’s budget is pushing districts such as Naperville, Evanston, Cicero/Berwyn and Chicago into deficits that will result in devastating cuts to the special education and other services students rely on. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In 2017, the General Assembly passed an evidence-based funding formula that requires adequate funding by spring of this coming school year.
If the governor was in compliance with Illinois’ own education funding requirements, Chicago’s school district would be facing a $1 billion surplus, not a deficit.
The scarcity our districts are facing isn’t a given; it’s a policy choice. And it’s made worse by new proposals giving away even more to developers at the expense of students and property owners.
If the parking meter deal taught us anything, it’s that the megaprojects bill as written is a road we don’t want to go down.
Investing in our students, however, the way some Springfield legislators are asking us to invest in the McCaskey family, is the best decision we could possibly make.
Jackson Potter is vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union.
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