Chicago parking rates have been frozen since 2022 and it “makes sense” to raise them annually to match the inflation rate — while asking out-of-town motorists to pay even more, the City Council’s most powerful member said Thursday.
The City Council just reached a compromise deal with Stonepeak Partners, the new owners of the city's parking meters, that included securing for city coffers 5% of net profits earned by Stonepeak. On the heels of that deal, Finance Committee Chair Pat Dowell (3rd) said Thursday that city employee pension funds stand to benefit from an automatic escalator locking in smaller, predictable parking rate increases to avoid periodic spikes.
Former Mayor Lori Lightfoot imposed an automatic escalator tying annual property tax increases to the inflation rate — before forfeiting that increase during what turned out to be her failed 2023 re-election bid. Mayor Brandon Johnson did the same.
“We haven’t raised parking rates since 2022… It makes sense to do an escalator… Making it more predictable helps everybody…Anytime we can take some revenue and put it in a lockbox and put it towards our pension liabilities, we should do that,” Dowell said.
“It may [also] be time to look at… different rates between Chicago residents — giving them a break — and charging suburbanites who use our parking system more… Suburbanites put wear and tear on our streets and use our system, and they don’t pay anything towards that.”
Dowell said there was initial talk of making future parking rate increases part of the profit-sharing compromise brokered with Stonepeak. But it was decided that “since that is a city responsibility, it did not need to be part” of the agreement. That makes setting future parking rates the next order of business for an even bigger negotiating team that Dowell has assembled.
They've already been advised that there is nothing illegal about charging different parking rates for vehicles with and without city stickers, and that separate rates would not be a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Nor does Dowell believe that charging higher parking rates for suburbanites and out-of-town motorists would discourage people from driving downtown to go to restaurants, concerts, theaters and museums, or spend the weekend in Chicago.
“People come to the city of Chicago because we have something to offer that they can’t get where they live. We have great shopping, great theater, great restaurants…They don’t come down every day. It’s a special trip,” Dowell said. “They park in garages now. They should be able to park at our meters as well."
Establishing two different sets of parking rates would require surveillance cameras and license plate readers to identify out of town vehicles.
Mayor Brandon Johnson was kept the City Council in the dark while submitting multiple bids for the city to take back the parking meters. After dropping out, Johnson threw the entire controversy into the City Council’s lap.
Dowell said the mayor’s decision to shift from playing hide the ball to hot potato “didn’t sit well” with her colleagues and only exacerbated Johnson's already tense relationship with an emboldened City Council that she believes is on another collision course with Johnson on the pre-election city budget.
Even worse, she said, was Johnson’s decision to insinuate that the 32 City Council members who voted to raise City Hall’s debt threshold and make it more difficult for the city to borrow money had racial motives.
“I can’t believe that Chicago has gotten to this point where we are pitting one group of people against another group of people. I don’t think that’s necessary and it’s certainly not productive,” said Dowell, one of a handful of African-American alderpersons to support what she called an exercise in “fiscal restraint.”
“We’re being divisive in our dialogue and in our politics, and we need to figure out ways to be more collaborative, to bring people together to have conversations. I don’t see that happening. That’s a problem.”
Four years ago, Dowell gave Johnson an early endorsement that turned out to be a turning point. She has since broken with the mayor, before joining the 29-member coalition that rejected Johnson’s corporate head tax.
On Thursday, Dowell was asked why she believes Johnson has had a difficult time getting along with the City Council, and has struggled with personnel issues.
“The people around him are smart people. [But] I would like to see people who have… a deeper understanding of government, who are willing to come outside of their bubble to engage with those who may not be in their bubble to work on problems,” she said. “There is a vacuum there.”
