Meters Already Re-Sold

Chicago was never really in the running:

• Chicago's parking meters have been sold to another private company. The Johnson administration considered buying the meters back, but the sale price was way too expensive.

  Parking downtown at a meter spot costs $7 an hour, up from $3 an hour when the city owned the parking meters 17 years ago. In what has been called a disastrous, lopsided 75-year deal, then-Mayor Richard M. Daley sold the meters to a private company for $1.15 billion.

  "They made about $2 billion in earnings, you know, basically a year, little over a year ago. So, they've already made their money back. For a company like this, it's easy to flip it to somebody else," Ald. Scott Waguespack said.

  Mayor Brandon Johnson says it sold to an unknown company for at least twice as much as the original price in 2008. For the past few months, the mayor's team looked into the possibility of buying the meters back. "We had our teams run the numbers and look at every variation of a potential deal. However, the more we looked into it, the more problems emerged," Johnson said.

Chicago has a spending problem more so than a revenue problem.

So how about closing under-utilized schools instead?