NYC wants a private company to manage its parking spaces. In response, Matt Taibbi rants against mayors leasing or selling parking meters to private companies:
In Chicago’s case, Mayor Richard Daley sold 75 years of meter revenue – worth an estimated $5 billion – for $1.2 billion. So he gets 20 cents on the dollar for the city’s parking meters in 2008, and then in 2009 the city still has a budget problem that’s now worse, because there’s no parking meter revenue anymore, ever. Meanwhile, a bunch of private investors rounded up by Morgan Stanley – these bankers go on road shows here at home and abroad to places like Geneva and the UAE to hawk discount American infrastructure to foreign billionaires and sovereign wealth funds – get to enjoy the fruits of raised rates. In some Chicago neighborhoods, the meter rates went from .25 cents an hour to $1 an hour in the first year of the deal, and then to $1.20 after that.
Mark Bergen counters Taibbi:
What sunk Chicago is not the handing over of pricing controls, but the one-off exchange: the lease handed over 75 years of meters for a billion and change in city budget fillers. The deal severed parking revenues for the city, and almost certainly failed to properly discount future cash flows—by $11 billion, give or take. (Hints are trickling out, around here, that Mayor Emanuel is searching desperately for a way to undo this arrangement.)
On this point, New York is also promising the very opposite.
The Dish 