tomato can

They sure are. It's all a bunch of BS! They hired a bunch of private contractors (politically connected) to do all these projects to make the city look nice. The cost overruns were enormous. Then the budget deficits came to light and they quickly shifted the focus onto the public employee's. People right away started screaming bloody murder that the public employees make to much money and the benefits are to generous. I will be the first to say pension reforms are needed to close loop holes because they are unsustainable and the employees should kick in for health care cost. Outside of that the public employees didn't cause this mess, its politicians and their private contractor buddies that run up these out of control deficits. They were smart enough to shift the focus to the public employees pay and benefits. Behind the scenes they brokered a crooked deal to privatize the parking garages, meters, the skyway for billions to pay down the deficits. The people that cried cut the public pay roll got their wish but with the wool pulled over their eyes. Those workers are now gone. The rates to park and use the skyway have soared to outrageous levels, and these jokers made out like a bunch of fat cats! And your point is? When the city controlled the meter it was $6 a day to park, now that it's privatized it $6.25 and hour!

I disagree. They hired private contractors to build Millenuim Park, knock down a bunch of project buildings, put in a bunch of flower boxes along Lake Shore Drive, & other projects to make the City look nice. They over spent on these projects and ended up running up a bunch of defecits. It had NOTHING, ZILCH, ZERO to do with the unions. The minute they would have raised fees to pay for these defecits all you would have heard was cut the public pay roll! They make to much money and are bankrupting the city, yet they had nothing to do with these projects. So they brokered some crooked deal with Morgan Stanley (crooks) to privitize those things, got rid of the public employees that worked there and stuck it to the people in the proccess!

Do you understand what I am saying? Yes we had some tough economic times. The cities debt was more than sustainable. All they had to do was raise the parking fees modestly and use the revenue to may down the budget defecit. Privatizing the parking garages & meters, & the Chicago Skyway has screwed the people. Yeah Chicago & Illinois have a history of coruption. The company that is Chicago Parking Meters LLC are a bunch of crooks also. According to the most recent filings, partnerships assembled by Morgan Stanley have a 50.1 percent stake in the parking company through capital provided by entities like the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, the Victorian Fund Management Corporation of Australia and Danish pension fund company PKA. The other 49.9 percent belongs to a company almost evenly divided between Allianz and Tannadice Investments LLC. Tannadice is a “wholly owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, which is a public institution wholly owned by the Government of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi,” according to city records. Another fund of the Abu Dhabi government owns an additional 3 percent stake through one of the Morgan partnerships.

Yes they were in need of money because they were running budget defecits. They could have easily raised the parking rates modestly and paid down those defecits over the course of a few years but people are always yelling, kicking, & screaming that we need to cut the public pay roll, we have to many public employees. It's the public employees maintaing the park garages and meters, ect. It was done rather cheap by the public employees because fees were rather small. Now that they have privatized it, look at what it cost to park!

One Company Tom. I copy & pasted the article below.... your thoughts???? Morgan Stanley paid Chicago $563 million for the rights to lease Chicago’s downtown parking garages. The $563 million the city received from the 99 year downtown parking garage lease is nearly half of the $1.15 billion dollars Chicago received from the 75 year parking meter lease. Compared to the parking meter lease, Mayor Daley bestowed Morgan Stanley with an additional 24 years to collect parking garage revenue from Chicago drivers who have little or no other parking options if they want to park downtown. Financial experts and citizens complain that the 75 year parking meter lease is too long, but the parking garage lease is worse, Mayor Daley leased the downtown parking garages for a length of time that is one-third longer (99 years) than the parking meter lease (75 years). The parking garage lease makes car owners vulnerable to price gouging. At least with the Chicago Skyway and the parking meter leases, Mayor Daley put the rates to drive on the tollway or park on public streets into the Skyway and parking meter contracts. Mayor Daley’s parking garage contract did not include a garage parking fee schedule, which means Morgan Stanley can charge what it wants for you to park in a downtown lot. Furthermore, Morgan Stanley can legally buy additional parking lots not owned by the city to create a parking monopoly. The terms of the downtown parking garage lease is the reason why it cost you $27.00 to park your car in a parking garage formerly operated by the city. When Mayor Daley sold off the rights to the Chicago Skyway, parking garages, and parking meters, Daley’s concern was his political future. Mayor Daley failed to consider neither the future of subsequent Chicago mayors nor the long-term fiscal security of Chicago. Mayor Daley sold off Chicago’s parking garages to payoff the debt he created in building Millennium Park. Mayor Daley has since spent Chicago parking meter, and Skyway lease money to pay other debts and bills to keep Chicago running during his tenure as mayor. Within five years Mayor Daley has spent nearly all of the $3.6 billion dollars that he received in upfront money from the toll road, parking meter and parking garage leases. For the next 94 years Chicago will not receive so much as a dime from people who pay to drive on the Chicago Skyway or park in a Morgan Stanley operated parking garage. For the next 73 years Chicago will not receive any cash each time a driver pays for street parking. Mayor Daley leveraged Chicago’s financial future so he could have more money to spend. Mayor Daley opting to turn Chicago assets into instant cash has put the city in a deep financial hole that will last 90 or more years.

It's a 75 year lease! Were screwed

Not sure who purchased the parking garages but it was purchased for 530 million dollars. Either way it never cost that much to park there before. It got privatized and the parking rates went right through the roof. In 2007 the City of Chicago took 20 mil from its parking meters. Prior to 2007 they tried several times to raise parking rates and the people cried foul and the city council always voted it down because it was a political hot potato. In 2008 they rammed the 1.15 bil 75 year lease of the parking meters through the city council and the parking rates soared. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel announced last week that he wasn’t going to pay a $14 million bill sent to the city by the company that runs the city’s parking meters. The bill in question from Chicago Parking Meters LLC, is for what the company says it’s owed for revenues lost when the city closed streets for repairs, street fairs, ect. The company recently sent the city a similar sized bill to compensate for the lost revenues from Chicago drivers using “disabled” placards. That’s currently in arbitration. A group of investors, led by Morgan Stanley, took over Chicago parking, ripping out old meters and replacing them with high-tech pay boxes. Street parking in Chicago’s Loop now costs $5.75 an hour. Next year it will be $6.50. By the end of the 75 year lease term, Chicago looks to pay CPM more than the original $1.16 billion lump sum payment it received in 2008, in other words, over the length of the contract, CPM will get their entire initial investment of $1.16 billion back through givebacks while reaping many billions of dollars in profits from Chicago drivers. This deal stinks for the people and this is what happens when you privatize!

They paid the city 1.15 billion for a 75 year lease of the parking meters. They say it cost between 3 & 4 million a year to maintain them. The city also leased out its parking garages. I had to go downtown to Northwestern Hospital for a test my doctor odered. Had to park in the parking garage 1 block from the hospital. I was there for 2 & half hours. It cost me $35 for parking in the garage.

I'm no liberal. More of a moderate. You are saying people are being taxed to death, well I copy & pasted the article below. What do you call this? Capitalism The private investors who run Chicago’s parking meters are doing better than expected, and now they’re demanding an additional $14 million they say they’re owed under obscure provisions of the wildly unpopular 2008 deal that privatized metered parking and caused rates to soar, records show.[...] The $14 million bill stems from parking revenues the meter company says it lost when the city took meters out of service last year because of street repairs, festivals and other city-sponsored activities, according to documents obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times. This is the second time in a year that the company has hit City Hall with a claim for a big parking tab. The Emanuel administration already is in arbitration over a $13.5 million claim over free parking that Chicago Parking Meters says it provided to people displaying disabled-parking placards or license plates in 2010. That makes the total disputed amount more than $27 million. The parking meter company took in more than $80 million from meters across Chicago in 2011, according to documents it filed this week with city officials. See, the private company is not running city parking meters. They are running parking spots in Chicago. and they want their money. City Parking Meters are there for a lot of reasons, and not just to simply to provide parking, but also to control parking availability and provide flexibility for important public esteem building events that need street space to be held, accommodations for the disabled and the like. Privatized meters are there to make a private company who runs them, money from controlling parking. From the Sun Times article I cited earlier in this post, Chicago meters made 23 million in revenue the year prior to the private takeover. If you expect this level of production for the next 75 years, they will yield about 1.785 billion for the company that paid 1.15 billion to lease the meters from the city. Meter revenue has already exceeded that in the 3 years since the private takeover: Meter collections kept by Chicago Parking Meters LLC since then: 2009: $45.6 million 2010: $71.2 million 2011: $82.8 million Average those together and you get $4.7904 billion over 72 years. Over 400% profit. 72 more years of this sh*tty deal for Chicago tax payers as revenue from the parking system of their city is siphoned away for a discount price.

I was told crime is down and we need to cut the Police force!

It's not going to look good there in a year or two. Not good for Israel but they knew the Muslim Brotherhood was going to win the election. We have to cut off the aid to them for now and try and get them on the right path.

What she needed to do was bring a bar of soap with her and stick in the filthy mouths of those rotten kids! Then grabbed them by the hair and slapped them around for having no manners and acting like a bunch of low lifes! Then you could have called her the evil bus driver who is abusing the kids on the school bus. Not to mention she would have been fired & sued, along with the bus company, & the probably the school. Point is she didn't enable those kids she just couldn't do a whole lot about it. The parents enabled those kids by not taking an active role in their lives. Parents need to start monitoring what kids are watching on TV, what they are doing on the internet, and stop them from listening to this rap/hip hop crap that puts these ideas in the kids heads!

I get what you are saying but that is not always the case with the private sector. Baseball teams, basketball teams, hockey teams are constantly raising ticket prices. Went to the Cubs -vs- RedSox game last Sunday. $94 dollars for the ticket. Went with 2 friends. Purchased the first round of beers, 3 beers were $23.25. One hot dog was $5. Been to see a movie lately? $10 per person to get in. Took my girlfriend so it was $20 to get in. 2 soda pops and a bucket of popcorn was $16 bucks. Been to the auto mechanic lately to have your car fixed? Parts and labor prices are extremely high. Those are all private sector companies and they are raising prices like mad! Government raises fees to cover costs, private sector does it not just to cover cost but to make a handsome profit.

November 2011 was the start of the Major Chicago Infrastructure Project & South Side Rail Crossing Project that created more than 1,200 jobs and will provide a major boost to the regional economy. The project located at 130th Torrence Avenue and the Northfolk Southern Railroad just outside of the Ford Motor Plant is a $150 Million dollar project. The project involves lowering 130th Street and Torrence Avenue to fit under two new bridges carrying the Norfolk Southern Railroad tracks. The two streets and the tracks currently intersect, resulting in more than 200 hours in delay for the 32,000 vehicles that drive through the crossing daily. Trucks leaving the Ford Motor Company assembly plant nearby can wait as long as 20 minutes because of passing trains. Other components of the project include lowering Brainard Avenue to connect directly to 130th Street and Torrence Avenue, realigning the South Shore commuter line over Torrence Avenue and the Norfolk Southern tracks and adding pedestrian bridges and paths. Construction will be complete in 2015. The State of Illinois & The Federal Government are providing 80% of the money for the project. The remaining 20% is coming from Northfolk Southern Railroad, Northern Commuter Transportation District, City of Chicago, & Ford Motor Company. While this project is a pain for me trying to get to the interstate highway every day I ride by there every day and see all the construction workers, Iron Workers, & Crane Operators, ect, out there on the job site WORKING every day! Other Chicago transportation projects currently under construction include: the $300 million Wacker Drive reconstruction, the $33 million Congress Parkway bridge rehabilitation and more than $680 million in capital funding for the Chicago Transit Authority. This is Public & Private investment on these major projects. The businesses in downtown Chicago pay a pretty nice sum in real estate taxes and they are demanding these major projects to be started and that their tax dollars are put into these projects to get people back to work and the economy growing again! I dont want to hear that crap about bad news for the company waiting to fix a bridge or a road. These hard working men & women are out there daily working and doing a dam fine job and bringing home the bacon baby! Crime may very well be down in some area's but its up in other area's. Chicago in 2005 had 13,900 Police Officers. Policeman that retired, were injured on the job, or left the Police Force were not replaced because of people like you screaming we need to cut the Police Force so the Chicago Police Department has just over 11,000 Police Officers today. Guess what crime is up in Chicago. Professionals leaving downtown Chicago are having to deal with flash mobs of teenagers & young adults attacking them for their cell phones, lap tops, IPADS, & wallets while trying to commute home from work on the train! My poor neighbor across the street came home from work to find some criminal took apart his central air conditioning unit for the copper and scrap metal. The Neighbor around the block had his garage broken into and his lawn mower, air compressor, & snow blower all stolen. Crime might be down in Big Mule, Mississippi but its not here and a lot of other area's! Did some research on Fireman. The National Fire Protection Association tracks and keeps data on fireman & fire related issues. There are 1,103,300 fire fighters in the United States. 335,150 (30%) are career fire fighters. 768,150 (70%) are volunteer fire fighters. You have no arguement left. 30% are getting a good salary, benefits, & pension. The rest are volunteers. What about that mass supply chasing lower demaned??? You sound like a guy that is more interested in more mass unemployment than a guy calling for economic growth. Its on the parents not the teachers to send these kids to school ready to learn. Quit blaming the teachers. Talk about supply and demnad. Is there less supply of children these days??? Yeah thanks Actually I had no problem with Walker and what he was trying to achieve. Public sector workers are needed. All Walker was trying to do was get them to realize unsustainable pension packages and free health benefits can't continue. Walker wasn't trying to fire those workers. Exactly Include all union workers!

I agree with you that throwing money at pet projects that have no economic return has to stop. Tell me how the City Of Chicago and 1,200 other Police agencies placing orders for new Police interceptor vehicles is not creating economic growth? Ford Motor Company added 1,100 more jobs. Those 1,100 workers now have a chance to purchase a home, a car, going shopping, invest their retirement in the stock market, ect. Looks to me like the money is going back into the economy and allowing it to grow. Police, Fire & teachers are extremely important jobs. Crime sure isn't falling here in Chicago. Homicides totals in Chicago, 2012 compared to 2011 : Month 2011 2012 January 28 40 February 24 28 March 23 53 April 30 40 May 38 50 June 33 33 Total 176 244 Those number are just for homicides. Less fires? Really??? That is the best you can come up with. I'm not willing to cut the number of fireman and take the chance to someone loses a life in a fire because of a man power shortage. Yeah the schools are failing. I'm sure you seen the video of those school kids verbally abusing the bus driver. Imagine having 10 of them in a classroom of 40 kids. It can become awfully difficult to teach the class when you have 10 circus clown disrupting the entire class. Schooling starts at home. Parents need to prepare their children for school so they can go there and learn. Getting rid of teachers and not attempting to educate children is the wrong answer. Parents need to get off their lazy behinds and take an active role in their kids life's and start raising them to be productive. Don't blame the teachers, i'm sure there are some bad ones but I am sure the majority are there putting in an honest days work and doing the best they can to try and educate the children. I got an education in the public school system here in Chicago and have done well for myself. I'm not rich but I am certainly not poor.

Were talking about 1,200 police agencies throughout the United States placing orders for those vehicles. Ford Motor Company is ecstatic. The renegotiated there contract with the United Auto Workers Union. Workers are no longer starting at $30 per hour, they are starting at $19 per hour with bonuses should production be good, plus the workers kept their jobs, health insurance, & pension. Plus 1,100 workers were added. The plant on here on the south side of Chicago employees about 4,500 workers. I did the math. 30k is a lot of money for a vehicle. Ford CEO pay rose 11% in 2011 to 29 million dollars. Not sure how many vehicles that represents. Obviously small towns aren't purchasing as many as a big city like Chicago but Ford didn't turn the work down, they added workers and a 3rd shift. They expect to be busy for some time making those vehicles. People can argue and claim its not economic growth because the public sector is getting the ball rolling. I tend to see it different. Ford being able to keep people working and adding people to the work force is creating economic growth. It gives people an chance to go out and purchase a home, buy a car, go shopping, invest in retirement in the stock market.

Yes it comes real estate & sales tax. Chicago is a big city and gets plenty of real estate & sales tax revuenue. They took the money and sent it right back into the PRIVATE SECTOR! You know the private sector, the only people who can economic growth, jobs, prosperity, and wealth for all! The ball and the money is in your court pal! The people that lost jobs in the recession don't need to attack someone that is still employeed. You make it sound as if Police, Fireman, & teachers wanted them to lose their jobs! The certainly didn't attack the private sector worker for making more money when the economy was good.

In researching the price of the vehicle I will correct some of my numbers. The City of Chicago put in an order to purchase 500 of those vehicles with the plan to purchase 1,800 replacing a 3rd of their againg fleet. 1,200 Police agencies have placed orders for those vehicles as well. Bottom line Ford was able to hire 1,100 private sector workers. The vehicle reportedly cost around 30k.

According to Ford Motor Company it will take a few years to roll out the 1,800 specially designed Police Vehicles that will have the new police interceptor motor. That is just the beginning. The City of Chicago has 13,000 Police Officers and an aging fleet of vehciles. There is more vehicles that will be built and purchased from Ford by the City shortly there after. The little guy machining parts can expect to see a steady flow of work machining parts for the new police interceptor motor.

These are same good kids that some poor under paid teacher has to deal with for 8 hours a day. According to some the teacher being a public sector worker "does not grow the economy " needs to be fired!

It most certainly does generate economic growth. About 6 months ago the City Of Chicago agreed to purchase 1,800 new Police vehicles from Ford Motor Company that are going be built at the Ford Plant on the southside of Chicago. Shortly after that announcement Ford added 1,100 workers & a third shift. All of those 1,100 jobs are private sector jobs. Looks to me like they are creating some economic growth for the private sector. Lets not forget that this is just the begining of replacing the cities aging fleet of police vehicles. Think some of those workers might want to purchase a new vehicle for themselves now that they have a job. The public sector and the private sector work hand in hand. I never understood the attack on Policeman, Fireman, & teachers. The Police for example, get a small uniform allowance from the city and have to kick money in out of there own pocket. Think the uniform store or the tailors that work there would be happy if the Police were cut considerably? Policeman are required to purchase their own firearm and they usually end up purchasing a back up firearm as well. Don't think the NRA & Smith & Wesson are cheerleading for a great reduction in the Police force. The money collected from property taxes & sales taxes are used to fund a lot of departments, the police being one of them. That money flows right back into the coffers of the private sector on numerous fronts. People get pissed because Policeman, Fireman, & Teachers are getting a modest salary, health insurance, and a pension. I don't know to many people lining up be a policeman for peanuts without insurance & a pension or 401k. How many people are going to run into a burning building for chump change??? Teachers have to put up with a lot of snot nose kids that don't listen at home or school. Guess what they are not going to do it for free. Oh and I forgot to mention in most big cities Police & Fire men have a residency requirememnt. They are the ones supporting to local mom & pop store and other small business with their tax payer salary!

Exactly! He should have stuck to what he was good at! What goes up...............must come

I have read the vast majority of the thread. Zimmer is not going to be okay on this. If he is charged he could very well land up in jail. If he walks he might end up needed a new identity. This guys life is ruined for the foreseeable future.

Zimmer was made out to be a racist monster & Martin was made out to be a choir boy in the beggining. After a few days were now being told Zimmer is a run of the mill stand up guy & Martin is not the choir boy he was made out to be. With all this innuendo going on they are lining up on both sides.