Whoops - More Money Disappears

Conehead's budget keeps running into problems:

• A Cook County judge has ordered the cash-strapped city to refund $163 million in penalties it tacked onto more than one million vehicle citations, fines that sometimes doubled the cost of a simple parking ticket. Those penalties inflated the city’s already steep ticket prices beyond the levels allowed by state law, Judge William Sullivan found in violation of state law.

  Sullivan’s ruling came Thursday after the case wound its way through the county’s notoriously slow court system for eight years. Sullivan found that Chicago had illegally piled late fees onto citations for routine infractions like parking violations, in some cases pushing the total bill past $500 for tickets that state law caps at $250.

This goes back to the Groot administration and maybe part of the 9.5 Digit Midget's. 

The ruling also affects a bunch of uncollected citation debt dating back years that was never collected, but was almost certainly "spent" over the years as part of the fantasy budget numbers. 

That $163 million was also spent. It doesn't exist any more. So something else will have to (A) be cut from the existing budget or (B) covered with some as yet undetermined tax levy.

So much good news.