49th Ward Cuts Deal On Its Lakefront Lots

By Jame Ginderske of  The Urban Coaster

June 25, 2009 – Area residents, outraged by the Chicago Park District’s proposal to charge new fees for overnight parking at Loyola and Leone Parks, packed this month’s meeting of the Chicago Park District Board.

The result of their activism was a compromise. In exchange for daytime fee increases plus a three-year deal where the 49th Ward agreed to pay the Park District an annual lump sum of $89,000 from its yearly infrastructure funds, overnight parking will remain free to residents.

As originally proposed, the Park District’s plan would have “had a tremendous harmful impact on my community,” according to Ald. Joe Moore (49th), who chartered a bus to transport residents to the meeting.

Park District CEO Tim Mitchell defended the need for increasing the revenue derived from the park-owned lots, saying: “We have to balance needs of people against raising property taxes. … I think this is a win-win for all of us.”

The overall Park District plan includes several other lakefront communities, but none of the other areas are affected by the June 10th  agreement.

It was a heated process to get to the compromise. Moore thanked area residents for the deluge of e-mails sent to the Park District about the issue, and Friends of the Parks President Erma Trantor said that Ald. Moore told her that “[Tim] Mitchell wasn’t even returning [Moore’s] calls when this started.”

Trantor had questions about the total revenue figures discussed at the meeting, and said she plans to follow up on precisely how much money will be raised from the various Park District parking rate increases.

To be sure, many residents are not all that pleased with even the compromise plan. There was a sense on the bus returning to Rogers Park that one woman summed up as: “It’s better than what they wanted to do, but I don’t like giving them our ward money either. They’re killing the average person with all this parking stuff.”

Another consideration of no-fee parking at night is the reduced chance for tickets to be written when people inevitably fail to properly pay the meter box that will soon replace the individual meters at the parks.

If just one person per night receives a ticket, the annual parking ticket fines add up to $18,250 per year. Three of the fifty dollar tickets written per night would take an additional $54,750 from residents.

The $89,000 works out to about $741 per space annually (based on 120 spaces), which further breaks down to about two dollars per night. The Park District’s original proposal was to charge 25 cents per hour, which was estimated to have added up to about $1,200 per year, per space.

“I think this is a reasonable compromise,” said Board President Gary Chico. “We do listen.”

That may be, but in the end ever more money is heading to the City of Chicago as fees associated with limited parking resources. In a working class neighborhood that is already feeling the City’s revenue wrath in so many other ways, such victories are welcome, but only in comparison to what they wanted to take in the first place.