City Pitching in to Fix Meters

By Prescott Carlson in News on Mar 26, 2009 7:30PM

Will the clusterf*ck otherwise known as the transfer of the city's parking meters into private hands finally be the thing to spur the citizenry of Chicago to vote Mayor Daley out of office? Well, no, probably not, but we think many are waking up to what a mess privatizing Chicago's assets can be.

In the latest parking meter foibles, the city is having to send out its own mechanics to help out overwhelmed LAZ Parking, who can't even keep up with updating meters with new rates much less the task of collecting coins and fixing broken meters. Ed Walsh of the Department of Revenue tells the Trib, "[LAZ Parking is] substantially increasing the number of crews performing collections and substantially increasing the number of meter mechanics in the field, as well as expanding the days and hours they are working," so the need for the city's own manpower should be temporary. And this is one time the taxpayers aren't getting the shaft (if you ignore the whole selling off of the meters in the first place) -- the city will be billing the company for the incurred extra expense.

But to be fair, it may be less a matter of too small of a workforce and more nobody anticipating the extra resources needed for what theexpiredmeter.com is calling a "meter revolt." They've documented a large number of instances of meter vandalism, from a simple expletive written on the rate sticker to entire meters being removed from the street. A favorite exploit is to stuff the meters full of pennies, since once the meters have reached capacity they become inoperable. One LAZ Parking worker told the website The Expired Meter, "We are finding a lot of pennies and nickels in coin slots. We see a lot of that going on.”