Emanuel Set To Restore Paid Sunday Parking In Some Business Areas
By Chuck Sudo in News on Mar 19, 2014 2:00PM
Photo credit: © 2014, Brooke Collins/City of Chicago
Mayor Rahm Emanuel will introduce an ordinance at April’s City Council meeting that will reverse the free Sunday parking in select neighborhood business districts across Chicago after months of complaints by aldermen and small-business owners that motorists were hogging parking spots and resulting in lost business because customers could not find places to park.
When Emanuel announced the changes to the much-maligned parking meter deal last year he crowed about the free Sunday parking as a linchpin concession. “As one resident told me, you shouldn’t have to pay to go to church,” he said at the time. Aldermen such as Scott Waguespack (32nd), John Arena (45th), Michele Smith (43rd) and Tom Tunney (45th) were promised metered Sunday parking would remain in their wards yet heard nothing from the Emanuel administration for nearly a year as the complaints from business owners mounted.
Waguespack said in December, “I think they're going to ignore it because they think the deal will just go away.” Tunney has also been lobbying the mayor’s office to bring back metered parking on Sundays, since his ward includes Wrigley Field. Parking is already a clusterfuck there during game days. Imagine how it is with free metered parking on Sundays.
“There’s a certain bias against the whole meter deal to begin with. There’s a feeling of, `At least we got free Sundays.’ But, it’s a shortsighted viewpoint because meters were there to encourage turnover. Instead, they park there from Saturday night until Monday morning.”
If Emanuel’s ordinance is passed by City Council it will further enrich the coffers of Chicago parking Meters LLC. By how much is anyone’s guess but Emanuel insists the revisions he negotiated to the parking meter contract “made a bad deal better.” A statement released from the mayor’s office March 5 touted the amended deal exchanging extra weeknight parking for free Sundays saved motorists $2.1 million and free Sunday parking saved drivers $8.7 million.
As with any numbers put forth by the Emanuel administration these warranted closer scrutiny. The Reader’s Ben Joravsky and Mick Dumke were more than happy to oblige but neither the city nor Navigant, the contractor hired by the Emanuel administration to audit the savings, would provide detail as to how they reached those numbers.
Navigant didn't actually compare what Chicago motorists paid into the meters in the second half of 2012 with what they paid under the new deal in 2013—at least not citywide.Instead, the new report measured "the actual results" against Navigant's original estimates last year.
"The savings to parkers and the net benefit to the City . . . have been greater than those we estimated," David Moes, Navigant's managing director, wrote Patton in the introduction to the report.
Basically, the chief finding of Navigant's latest report is that its original report was off target.
It's not clear how Navigant reached its conclusions. The new report didn't explain its methodology. It didn't provide or cite any data. It didn't reveal the totals of how much drivers across the city fed into the meters—either in the affected areas or in areas where no hours were changed.
And it didn't explain where its "actual results" came from. In past years, CPM didn't release revenue or usage data until the end of April, after the figures had been audited.
Ald. Brendan Reilly told the Reader the report “was really just a memo that says, 'I told you so.’”