Why Is Mayor Johnson Keeping Secrets About The Parking Meter Deal?

CHICAGO — Mayor Brandon Johnson ripped the parking meter deal again last week.

“It’s the worst municipal deal in the history of municipalities,” he said at a media briefing. And, a few minutes later: “This is obviously, again, the worst deal ever.”

Johnson is clearly with the people on this one. Chicagoans almost universally agree the 2008 meter privatization deal is a stinker, and any mayor who could nix it would go down in history as a hero.

Yet last year Johnson passed up a chance to buy the city out of “the worst deal ever.” The mayor said regaining city control of its parking meter system wasn’t worth the multibillion-dollar cost. 

But how the mayor reached that conclusion remains shrouded in secrecy. Johnson and his aides have refused to disclose records showing what analysis or calculations they made while putting their bid together out of the public eye. Even members of the City Council have been left in the dark.

Still, the council is now under pressure to approve a new meter sale, to different private investors, that alderpeople and the public know almost nothing about. 

As with the city’s bid, the mayor and his team won’t share what they know about the proposed new transaction, saying they have to keep quiet under a confidentiality agreement they signed with Chicago Parking Meters LLC, the entity that currently controls the meters.

The mayor and his aides won’t even say what the confidentiality agreement covers, and they won’t let the City Council or the public see what it says. 

Alderpeople now face a deadline next month to vote on the new meter sale, a timeframe negotiated in private by the mayor’s team. 

At stake is the money private interests are collecting from the meters — CPM reported nearly $189 million in revenues last year alone — as well as control of the parking spaces themselves, which are likely to grow in value as the city tries to manage the streets for cars, buses, bikes, scooters and other vehicles in the decades to come. 

Many alderpeople are demanding the Mayor’s Office spell out exactly what it knows, starting with what happened during the meter bidding process.

“The fact that all that was going on without us knowing is extremely problematic,” said Ald. Andre Vasquez (40th). 

Sold For A Fraction Of Their Value

The original parking meter privatization deal was forged in secrecy. With nearly unchecked power in Chicago, former Mayor Richard M. Daley routinely concealed public information until the time might arrive when he decided to tell us what we needed to know. 

And so it was on Dec. 2, 2008, when Daley announced the city had made a deal that would bring in nearly $1.2 billion: An entity led by the investment bank Morgan Stanley would lease the city’s 36,000-meter system for 75 years. While the investors would get all the meter revenues during that time, Daley stressed how important the upfront cash was during a dire economy. 

That was the first time most Chicagoans had heard about selling the rights to the parking meters. But city officials and highly-paid consultants and lawyers — including some representing Morgan Stanley — had been crafting the deal behind closed doors for more than a year and a half. 

Just two days after Daley’s announcement, I was among the reporters who witnessed the City Council rubber stamping the meter deal by a vote of 40-5. Many alderpeople admitted they hadn’t read the 200-plus-page contract, let alone grasped it.

Along with other Chicagoans, they soon realized that Daley’s team had auctioned off the meters for a fraction of their value. Plus, the city had to pay Chicago Parking Meters LLC millions of dollars a year in penalties — called true-up payments — when it took meters out of service, whether for street repairs, gas line work, bike lanes or neighborhood festivals. 

The meters kept generating money — lots of it. Through 2025, CPM reported nearly $2.2 billion total in meter revenues, almost twice what it paid upfront, with 58 years of the deal to go. The city shared in none of those proceeds. In fact, the city has paid CPM a total of $246 million in true-ups, effectively returning more than a fifth of the money it originally got out of the agreement.

The meter deal has been a windfall for the private investors. But by early 2025, the parties that owned Chicago Parking Meters — Morgan Stanley, the German firm Allianz, and the the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority — were preparing to cash out and sell the meter concession. I first learned about it not from anyone with the city, but through a report by financial information site ION Analytics. 

Winning Bid

By January 2025, 16 years after Daley’s meter selloff, the Johnson administration was secretly working on a bid to buy back control. 

Email logs I received from the Mayor’s Office show that city officials communicated for months with consultants at EY, widely known as Ernst and Young; investment bankers with J.P. Morgan; and attorneys with Katten Muchin Rosenman, the firm that was paid $663,000 to help Daley’s team draw up the original meter deal. 

The city eventually put together a bid of about $3 billion, sources said. The city’s team also came up with options to pay for it, including city bonds and new ways to generate income from the parking system. 

As part of the bidding process, the city signed a confidentiality agreement. City officials say such agreements are common for financial negotiations, though “a little weird,” as one person put it, when those deals involve public assets. 

In November, the city made the highest bid for the meters, according to multiple sources. Some members of Johnson’s financial team were ready to go forward, confident the city could cover the cost over time while regaining full control of its on-street parking spaces, an important consideration as driving and transportation habits change. 

But the mayor ultimately said no. He said the risk from the city taking on billions of dollars in additional debt was too high.

None of this was public at the time. 

CPM turned to the next-highest bidder, New York-based investment firm Stonepeak. On Dec. 30, the parties signed a purchase agreement, according to city correspondence.

So the city was already out of the bidding by mid-January, when ABC-7 broke the news that Johnson’s administration had been exploring a plan to regain control of the meter system. Other reports soon followed, stressing the price would be in the billions.

Within days, the mayor announced it wasn’t happening.

“I want to put the rumors to bed,” Johnson said. “We are not pursuing a purchase of the city’s parking meters at this time. … The final purchase price was much too high, much more than we initially received for the sale and higher than most reasonable assumptions would support.”

‘Burdensome’

Not everyone on the mayor’s team agreed with that last statement, but the decision was made. And the Mayor’s Office didn’t want to share the details.

After Johnson’s comments, I sent a FOIA request to the Mayor’s Office for reports and analyses from the possible buyout of the parking meter agreement. Two weeks later, the Mayor’s Office denied my request, informing me it was “burdensome.” The office said it would take too long to go through all the records it had, including emails with officials from J.P. Morgan and EY adding up to “approximately 26,000 pages of documentation.”

The Mayor’s Office did eventually provide me with that log of city emails with EY and J.P. Morgan. Most of the messages had the subject lines “Project Burnham” or “Project Camaro,” apparently the secret code names for the meter bid project and sale; Camaro is part of the name of affiliates of Stonepeak, the bidder CPM moved on to after the city bailed. 

After I asked for copies of 20 of the emails, the mayor’s office sent me 56 pages of records. But almost every message was blacked out. The mayor’s office said the materials are exempt from public viewing because they involve legal or policy deliberations. 

When I followed up, a spokesperson for the mayor said the confidentiality agreement with CPM prohibited the city from providing detailed information about the bid. 

But Johnson’s administration has so far declined to reveal what the confidentiality agreement actually says. This week the Law Department informed me officials would need more time to respond to my request for a copy, writing “the requested records have not been located in the course of routine search” and “the requested records require examination and evaluation … to determine if they are exempt from disclosure.” 

So the law department says it hasn’t found the confidentiality agreement the mayor keeps citing, though it simultaneously needs more time to examine the document. 

No Votes

I wasn’t the only one who was blocked from the bid details. Alderpeople soon started demanding to know why they were out of the loop.

They were prompted by another twist in the meter saga: By opting out of the buyback, Johnson made room for a new set of private investors to purchase control of the meters and their cash flow for the next 58 years. 

But the city government is still involved in that transaction. Under the intricate terms of the original meter deal — the one despised by the mayor and just about everyone else — the City Council has to approve any transfer of control over the system. That’s supposed to enable city leaders to protect public interests.

Instead, the Mayor’s Office has clammed up. In March, Johnson administration officials briefed some alderpeople on the pending meter sale to Stonepeak, but declined to answer many of their questions, citing the confidentiality agreement. 

The mayor and his team stuck to that position even as they took steps to advance Stonepeak’s acquisition of the meters. On May 20, the mayor introduced an ordinance to the City Council that would authorize the sale. He said last week he was just doing what the 2008 agreement required. 

Attached to the legislation were 450 pages of economic disclosure forms, showing the tree of investors on both sides of the transaction. Among other details, the documents revealed that the Stonepeak ownership group would include the Oregon Public Employees Retirement Fund and the Washington State Investment Board. 

That means if the sale goes forward, some of the money from Chicago’s street parking system will end up helping retired government workers in other states — while the city of Chicago, facing its own mounting pension obligations, gets none of it.

The alderpeople’s frustration broke into the open in early June. Twenty-two signed a letter to Johnson blasting him and his aides for invoking the confidentiality agreement and dodging their questions. The alderpeople vowed to vote against the CPM sale to Stonepeak “based on the fact that your administration has systematically withheld the information necessary for proper evaluation.”

The threat couldn’t have been a shock to the mayor and his aides, since many of the alderpeople who signed the letter regularly cast no votes against his initiatives. But three days later, some of Johnson’s staunchest allies were among 15 alderpeople who signed a letter to Stonepeak demanding “transparency and a community impact review.” 

The progressive-minded alderpeople wrote that Stonepeak owns Omni Air International, a contractor with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “With the ongoing harm inflicted on Chicago immigrant communities by federal immigration enforcement, including the death of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, who controls the city’s public infrastructure must be scrutinized,” they said in a statement accompanying the letter.

Since then, CPM and Stonepeak have worked multiple angles to keep their deal on track. Leaders of Stonepeak have provided hundreds of pages of documents to the council’s finance committee and said they could sell Omni, the DHS contractor. Meanwhile, prominent trial lawyer Dan Webb, representing CPM, essentially threatened the city with legal action that could lead to “financial catastrophe” if the council doesn’t approve the sale.

Dennis Pedrelli, the CEO of Chicago Parking Meters, didn’t respond to my questions about the confidentiality agreement, though other lawyers for the company have said they’ve lifted it. 

Still, the mayor continues to use the confidentiality agreement to shield himself from the meter ownership saga. After the June 17 City Council meeting, he insisted again that it’s entirely up to alderpeople to vet the meter sale, and that the confidentiality agreement “is still in effect.” 

Ald. Scott Waguespack (32nd) cast one of the five votes against the original meter deal. Unlike the rushed vote in 2008, he said many of his current colleagues are “exercising extreme caution” about the pending sale while demanding to know more about the city’s bid.

At the top of his questions: “Why won’t the mayor come out and say something?”

The finance committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on the proposed sale on Thursday.