We’re nearing the point at which the City Council must decide whether to approve the pending sale of Chicago’s despised and detested parking meter privatization from 2008 from an initial group of purchasers known as Chicago Parking Meters LLC and led by Morgan Stanley to the New York-based investment firm Stonepeak Partners.
Not so shockingly, it has sparked a battle between Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office and a large group of aldermen.
One would think that, given the myriad disagreements between Johnson and a bloc of council members over the budget, public safety and other issues, a unified approach to taking all steps possible to improve the awful meter situation as much as possible would be desirable. It doesn’t appear so.
Twenty-two aldermen signed a strongly worded letter on Monday addressed to Johnson. They threatened to vote no on the proposed sale of the parking windfall to Stonepeak, and we believe more aldermen support their position, bringing that number to a majority of the 50-member body.
Their reason isn’t that they think the city has the legal standing to “just say no” to the sale. One of the signatories, 32nd Ward Ald. Scott Waguespack has said publicly more than once that the original meter deal negotiated by Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration and quickly muscled through the council, is “ironclad.” (Waguespack was one of just five council members smart enough to vote against the original meter deal in 2008.)
Instead, they accuse the mayor’s office of withholding basic information from them, including the details of the administration’s bid, which it later decided not to finalize, to buy back the meters and all the analyses performed by the city’s finance and legal teams on the issue. They say the mayor’s office told them only on May 18 of the existence of a nondisclosure agreement with Morgan Stanley that prevented City Hall from sharing those details with aldermen.
In the letter, the aldermen expressed disbelief that a mayoral administration would enter into an arrangement in which its own subject matter experts couldn’t speak in depth with the council on a matter that required council approval.
“This is, to our knowledge, without precedent in Chicago city government,” they wrote.
Sounds like a terrible predicament.
Except it’s not.
We’ve confirmed from two sources that Morgan Stanley lifted the NDA last week.
So the mayor’s office should have informed the council right away of that development and quickly furnished the materials, right?
That didn’t happen, and the alders felt compelled on Monday to air their grievances with the fifth floor in public. As we write, the mayor’s office hasn’t responded officially to the council members.
We asked the mayor’s office whether it would cooperate with the council now that the NDA issue is moot. Imagine our surprise when they told us the confidentiality agreement “is still in effect.”
It seems to us as if the administration wants its hands to be tied.
So what’s going on here? What should be a simple, straightforward matter of an administration and council rowing in the same direction on an issue on which both ostensibly agree has become a needlessly convoluted tug-of-war. All Chicagoans hate the parking-meter deal. It exacerbates the annual budget shortfalls that have plagued Johnson’s term more than any other single issue.
Why, if you’re Brandon Johnson, would you want to be perceived as obstructionist on something that unites Chicagoans?
We also understand that representatives of Stonepeak are expected to answer questions from and provide feedback to aldermen next week.
So time is growing short. Under the terms of the original deal, the council has about six weeks to make a determination on the sale, we’re told.
That’s why the mayor’s office’s lack of cooperation with the council is so aggravating. The issue of the NDA should have been a non-issue weeks ago. The council and its attorneys and counselors should have had access to the same information the mayor’s office had weeks ago as well.
We don’t know how much difference this information blackout ultimately will make in terms of winning concessions from Stonepeak; we’ve already editorialized that Stonepeak, which has a high-minded set of purposes, should make some meaningful concessions to get this likely lucrative deal done, not just as a goodwill gesture but as a deposit in the favor bank it might well need in the future.
Chicagoans expect Mayor Johnson and the council to work together to turn over every rock in order to make this debilitating meter situation less onerous. Why is our mayor not doing that?
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