Everybody Knows The Parking Meter Deal Stinks But Is It Legal

• Attorney Clint Krislov argues that Chicago’s parking meter privatization deal is unconstitutional.

Five years after it was put into place, Chicago’s parking meter privatization deal is widely seen as one of the great taxpayer rip-offs in the city’s history. The open question is whether it’s legal.

Lawyers for the city and for CPM countered that the city still has the power to do whatever it wants with the meters, and they cited the true-up payments as proof.

In 2012 a Cook County judge ruled that the agreement may be “a bad deal,” but the fact that the city was fighting to keep it in place—under both mayors Richard Daley and Rahm Emanuel—meant that it must be achieving some public purpose. The citizens in the IVI-IPO couldn’t show that they were personally harmed by the deal, the judge ruled.

Krislov, though, kept hammering at the point that taxpayers will continue to lose out if the deal remains in place. “This is a creature that has never been approved before and should not be allowed.”