In a 40-5 ruling, the Chicago City Council approved a plan Dec. 4 that sold the city’s publicly owned parking meters to Morgan Stanley for a fee of $1.2 billion. Mayor Richard M. Daley organized the sale, claiming the revenue will help close the city’s large budget gap.
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The 75-year lease of Chicago’s 36,000 parking meters is a crime against working people and a gift to the banks. The sale will lead to the quadrupling of the prices for two-thirds of the parking spots, no more free Sunday or holiday parking and 24-hour charges in downtown locations.
Despite Mayor Daley’s praise for this plundering of government assets, he admitted that the money the city will procure would not solve Chicago’s budget problems. “I can’t say that we still won’t be forced to cut spending, make additional layoffs or look for new revenue” through the continued privatization of the city’s public assets, Daley told reporters.
Daley promises to allocate $100 million from the sale to “programs to help the needy,” but when faced with such exponential rises in parking costs and the continued rise in unemployment, it is hard to imagine that these proposed programs will truly be able to ease the intensifying burdens workers continue to face.
Aside from the immense profits Morgan Stanley is posed to collect from the deal, the company has already begun looking into new security cameras to be associated with meters to photograph the license plates of parking violators in order to mail out stiffer fines.
This plan comes about in the midst of severe cuts to essential services like snow plowing, rises in city college tuitions, and the prospect of continued job losses for city, county and state workers. The plan is yet another example of the ransacking of public wealth by the moneyed class in the name of addressing the current economic crisis while the workers shoulder the load.
