Mayor Brandon Johnson said Tuesday City Hall has dropped out of the competition to take back Chicago parking meters after determining that the $3 billion asking price “would have made a bad deal even worse.”
“The price is too high and requires debt service payments that extend too far and impose too much risk. Chicagoans would most likely end up footing the bill, yet again… The more we looked into it, the more problems emerged,” Johnson said Tuesday.
“The City would have been required to debt-finance the entire purchase,” Johnson continued. “This would eliminate the flexibility to… remove parking meters to make way for pedestrian ways and bike lanes. Instead, we would be locked into ever rising debt payments that would require City Council to consistently vote to raise parking rates year after year.”…