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Finance Committee backs $2.5 billion sale of Chicago parking meters after sweetening lopsided deal

suntimes.com · 6h · first reportShare

The City Council’s Finance Committee on Thursday approved New York investment firm Stonepeak Partners’ $2.53 billion bid to acquire Chicago parking meters, along with a compromise aimed at making the widely despised meter deal less onerous for taxpayers. “We were handed a lemon and we made lemonade,” Finance Chair Pat Dowell (3rd), one of a handful of City Council leaders who helped broker the deal, told fellow committee members. Calling former Mayor Richard M. Daley’s 2008 decision to lease Chicago parking meters to private investors for 75 years “an example of what not to do,” Dowell said Chicagoans from “every corner of the city have become increasingly disillusioned” with a deal that allowed private investors from as far away as Abu Dhabi to recoup their $1.15 billion investment two-fold with 57 years to go on the deal. The committee passed the measure, with only two Council members, Budget Committee Chair Jason Ervin (28th) and Ald. William Hall (6th) voting against it. The full C