Friday, August 21, 2009
Politics / Clout City / News Much has been revealed—about the parking meter deal
Posted by Mick Dumke on Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 7:13 PM
Months ago the Reader asked the city for agendas from the meetings held to determine the winning bidder for the parking meter lease. The city complied—but most of the documents had been blacked out. So we wrote about that.
Scott Waguespack, alderman of the 32nd Ward, was bothered when he heard, and at a public hearing on July 2 he asked Daley administration officials for a clean copy of the documents. As of last week, he was still waiting and I was still writing about it.
Then a funny thing happened.
On Wednesday the good-government group IVI-IPO brought the parking meter privatization mess back into the news by suing the city over it. That same day the documents appeared in Waguespack’s City Hall mailbox. He said no explanation was given.
Progress Illinois' Angela Caputo has a fine post on this development (as well as a clip from an interview with Andy Shaw, the energetic new director of the Better Government Association; he makes the spot-on point that whether the lawsuit succeeds or not may be less important than the additional information about the deal it might reveal to the public).
You can read the docs here (pdf). Tom Lanctot, a top official with William Blair & Company, the city’s financial adviser for the deal, told Waguespack in July that there was nothing “nefarious” about the documents—which only underscores the absurdity of keeping them private all this time.
That said, the documents do clarify a few things.
• They confirm that the only people present for the unveiling of the bids—the end of what the city has described as a “robust, open, transparent, and competitive bid process”—were top officials with the Daley administration and William Blair, which was awarded a no-bid contract to help execute the deal. The bid opening was done in William Blair’s offices.
• The bidders were required to submit economic disclosure statements revealing details about their investors and financial interests—supposedly giving city officials a heads up about possible conflicts of interest. But the city lawyer working on the deal apparently didn’t have time to give them more than a quick read before the decision was made to move ahead with the deal: “Jim McDonald will begin reviewing any EDS forms delivered with the bid packages,” the agendas say. And the next step: “Jim McDonald to identify any preliminary issues related to the EDS submissions.” The more than 200 pages of documents together revealed an extremely complicated ownership structure for the bidding entity. The documents call it Morgan Stanley, though the agreement was signed by Chicago Parking Meters LLC, an entity Morgan Stanley later formed.
• If the deal continues to be a political problem for the city, Mayor Daley will have a hard time deflecting blame, as is his custom. The agendas make it clear that the project will proceed only “if Mayor Daley elects to accept the bid.”
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“Jim McDonald will begin reviewing any EDS forms delivered with the bid packages”
“Jim McDonald to identify any preliminary issues related to the EDS submissions.”
The City did their due diligence on the bids and economic disclosures in real time, opening the bids, blessing the disclosures, and phoning Daley with their selection, all in one meeting. Damn, these guys are GOOD! That's efficiency! McDonald must have had his laptop open burning up the Googles there in Blair's Conference Room 2929 . He was vetting a limited liability company that had been formed only days earlier, so there wasn't exactly oodles of info out there on Hoover's to guide him, but he got it done, that's just how good he is!
Some of the info is missing at the bottom of the fresh documents. Are you sure the city gave you undoctored pages?
“Jim McDonald will begin reviewing any EDS forms delivered with the bid packages”
“Jim McDonald to identify any preliminary issues related to the EDS submissions.”
A less capable lawyer might have protested, "Um, guys, these are complex documents and complex business entities and it's simply not reasonable to expect legal to sign off on them so quickly. Either pre-qualify the respondents, require the disclosures ahead of the bids, or allow us time for due diligence between bid opening and awarding." But not our public servant Jim McDonald. His Mayor and Morgan Stanley agreed: time was of the essence.
Mick,
First, thanks again to you and Ben for continuing to pursue these important issues. Second, great job on Chicago Tonight discussing the parking meter lease with my alderman. Third, I apologize in advance for a post that may soon seem to be off-point. Because my principal focus is a continued lack of transparency in the Daley administration, I hope you'll let me slide.
In any event, in recent days, I've found myself in an online blog discussion with Chicago nightclub impresario Billy Dec. Mr. Dec, it seems, is part of the official Chicago 2016 marketing team, and the Tribune has linked to (and is promoting) his blog, which, of late, features daily "celebrity" interviews that explain why having the Olympics in Chicago would be wonderful.
Here is the link to a recent thread, which features Mr. Dec interviewing Jimmy Fallon:
http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/chicago-th…
Why Chicago 2016 is focusing efforts on generating "celebrity" love -- mostly out-of-state "celebrity" love -- for Chicago's Olympic bid is beyond me, but Mr. Dec states that he will post "at least one new celebrity interview a day" until he "land[s] in Copenhagen on [October] 2nd to hear the official announcement."
Given that amount of airtime, I've asked Mr. Dec to turn his camera on his friend Mayor Daley to ask why Chicagoans should trust him and his friends to run the 2016 Olympics in a clean, transparent manner. To justify this request, I mentioned the parking meter mess, ongoing TIF abuse, FOIA issues, and even suggested that Ben Joravsky be permitted to conduct some of the follow-up questioning of the Mayor during this "celebrity" interview at City Hall.
Thanks again to you and Ben for your diligence and your persistence covering our city's culture of corruption.
Here's the text from my most recent post to Mr. Dec's blog:
Dear Billy,
I'll stipulate to a couple of things: (1) you and I live in a "celebrity"-obsessed culture; and (2) your business is bolstered, in part, by that societal obsession -- so I do understand your interest in continuing to feed that beast, and I don’t fault you -- the businessman -- for your efforts.
I do believe, however, that this "celebrity" obsession has contributed to a marked dumbing-down of our society. You doubt me? Check out just about any issue of the Chicago Tribune's RedEye; examine the Nielsen numbers for "I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!"; or take a critical look at just about any mass media project involving your friend Paris Hilton. (By the way, what is it that I should tell my two daughters she did to become "famous"?) My lack of interest in this "culture" should help explain my absolute lack of interest in whether folks like Jimmy Fallon, Flavor Flav, or The Octomom would like to see Chicago host the 2016 Olympics.
Personally, I'm not interested in seeing the 2016 Games come to town, and here are just a few of the reasons why: I live on a pothole-riddled Chicago street with a caved-in sewer just twenty yards from my house. The guy who answers phones at my alderman’s office tells me has no idea when a city crew will get around to fixing that sewer (much less the potholes) -- budget issues, he says. My kids attend school in the cash-strapped, under-performing Chicago public school system, where high school graduation rates are abysmal. (I serve on a Local School Council at one public school, and I’ve volunteered for seven years as a "lawyer-in-the-classroom" at another.) Our city is overrun with crime, yet our police force can’t get a contract. In fact, our city actually "closed" one day last week for what was the first of several unpaid furlough days. And all of this is happening while, I believe, taxpayers are being robbed blind by Mayor Daley’s continued abuse of his tax increment financing program.
Which brings me to my biggest reason for opposing the Games: I just don’t trust the Mayor and his friends to run a clean, transparent operation. Think about it. These are the folks that gave us -- to name just a few of their "Greatest Hits" -- the Hired Truck scandal, years of patronage hiring, the middle-of-the-night destruction of Meigs Field, the ill-conceived parking meter lease, the Vanecko pension fund mess, the convictions of Messrs. Tomczak, Duff, Sorich, Torres, Sanchez, etc. As a result, they no longer have my trust. In fact, they no longer have the trust of a lot of Chicagoans.
Maybe you, as a friend of the Mayor, can explain to me or to other Chicago taxpayers why we should trust Mr. Daley and his cronies with this venture. Better yet, rather than using your video camera to ask the stars of "Melrose Place" why they think it would be "awesome" if Chicago hosted the 2016 Games, maybe you can roll tape and ask the Mayor why, given the well-documented history of corruption in our town, we should trust him with the Games. (If follow-up questions aren't your thing, maybe you can have Carol Marin, Ben Joravsky, or Patrick Fitzgerald ride shotgun with you.) Maybe you can ask Alderman Flores or Alderman Waguespack whether either will recommend to the City Council that the "private" 2016 organizing committees be bound by Freedom of Information Act rules, since those committees may soon be feeding at a trough filled with $500 million of our money. Maybe you can talk to some of the powerless folks whose homes will be razed for the Olympics about their views on eminent domain.
Or you can continue to weigh in with the video musings of random supermodels and sitcom stars who don't, as the Mayor likes to put it, have any "skin in the game."
Sincerely,
Matt Farmer
Although Mick has written another outstanding post, the headline "Much has been revealed--about the parking meter deal" is misleading. The parking meter deal was fait accompli before it went up for bid. Hence, what really occurred is unknown because the parking meter deal was done before anything was put in writing. Backroom deals like the parking meter lease is how Chicago works.
"...the documents do clarify a few things."
The public's right to know was trampled, as clarified by the documents. In particular, Chicagoans have a right to know who we are doing business with. The City's Municipal Code requires all those doing business with the City to file economic disclosure statements (EDSs). If a company is a partnership, then each partner company has to disclose, and so on, until the process bottoms out at live human beings.
http://egov.cityofchicago.org/webportal/CO…
The disclosure laws are for the benefit of the public, not just aldermen.
"It is the City's policy to make this document available to the public on its Internet site..."
http://egov.cityofchicago.org/webportal/CO…
The parking meter concession agreement has been effective for 9 months but it and its associated raft of disclosures have yet to be posted on the City's contract disclosure website:
http://webapps.cityofchicago.org/VCSearchW…
Incomplete or false statements on these disclosures are grounds for rescission. If one or more of the blue boxes "NO EDS NEEDED" on this chart in fact were required to disclose, we have an out:
Now it makes sense
http://www.chicagoreader.com/TheBlog/archi…
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