In December, the City Council gave a quickie 40-5 nod to Mayor Daley’s $1.15 billion, 75-year handoff of the city’s parking meters to a private company. The takeover was an admitted failure logistically, and today’s report from the office of inspector general David Hoffman [peruse the entire document here] confirms what some suspected all along: that the deal was also a complete financial boondoggle. The meters were worth nearly twice as much, the report states, if the city had retained ownership for the next 75 years.
Shamed aldermen should be wiping the egg off their blushing faces for quite some time after letting this Daley doozy slide by unexamined. Unfortunately I don’t see that happening in a city where many members of the hands-off Council vote with the mayor an anomalous 95 percent of the time.
And now comes the predictable period of belated inquiry from the Council. In an e-newsletter that came this afternoon, 49th Ward Ald. Joe Moore (who voted in favor of the parking meter lease) states, “This report is a painful but necessary must-read for every member of the City Council. It is long past the time for the Council to begin acting as the co-equal branch of city government that it was intended to be…. The Mayor, his administration and the public at large would benefit from a more active and engaged City Council.”
As good-intentioned as Moore’s message is (and, to his credit, he has recently supported expanding the powers of the inspector general), his honesty is baffling; he describes the most basic function for which we elect aldermen (to serve as a check against mayoral power) then admits that the Council isn’t performing its cardinal duty. Kudos to Moore for fessing up to the Council’s failure and pledging support for “an ordinance to create a new review process for future sales or long-term leases of city assets.” Let’s just hope our aldermen see passing that ordinance not as a face-saving crisis PR stunt but rather as the the beginning of the end of the Council’s vote-first-ask-questions-later protocol.
Is it just me or does everyone else see that Joe is trying to pull one of his classic acts of BS? Ward 49’s resident dope votes for the privatization of Chicago’s parking meters despite being grossly uninformed, the Inspector General proclaims it a rotten deal, and Joe’s latest email flatulence proudly proclaims that he will personally champion ” a new review process for future sales or long-term leases of city assets.”
In other words, Joe is suggesting that the reason he voted for the dog of a deal is not because he’s an idiot who didn’t do his homework and wasn’t bright enough to see this train wreck for what it was; he voted for it because there wasn’t a good enough “process” in place for making smart decisions. You know. A better process will fix that.
Joe even admitted that it was one of the worst votes he has cast, but he has failed to say why he voted for it. He failed to say why he screwed up so badly. He failed to disclose his own “process” for voting on these types of legislation, which is clearly to avoid doing any real work to make smart decisions. You know. Like smart people.
Sounds like a lot of crap talk to once again avoid admitting he’s not capable of doing his job.