Three City Council leaders who negotiated the compromise that sweetened Stonepeak Partners’ $2.53 billion deal to acquire Chicago's parking meters are calling a special City Council meeting on Monday to take action that could blow a $75 million hole in Mayor Brandon Johnson’s tax-heavy budget.
Finance Chair Pat Dowell (3rd), her predecessor Scott Waguespack (32nd) and Ald. Nicole Lee (11th) want to compel Johnson to use the $75 million up-front payment from Stonepeak they negotiated without the mayor’s help to be applied to the 2026 city budget as an extra payment that chips away at the city’s $36 billion pension crisis.
Without consulting the City Council, Johnson decided to use the $75 million windfall to help defray the cost of the $363 million pension advance for 2027. That’s not what the City Council intended, nor was it what the ordinance that was passed by a 46 to 3 vote required.
That ordinance stated that the up-front payment that the city received when Stonepeak closed the deal last week — as well as profit sharing going forward — must be earmarked for pension payments over and above the $2.79 billion pension payment required by state law.
“Our goal was always to use this money to reduce our pension liability — not to maintain a steady level,” Dowell told the Sun-Times Tuesday.
“We have to start somewhere… It’s a good use of the funds to reduce taxpayer liability for pensions. Every year, most of our property tax… goes towards pensions. This helps to reduce that liability for taxpayers… If we just wanted the money to be used any old way, we would have been silent on that in the ordinance we passed in September and allowed those dollars to go into the general fund.”
Lee added, “The earlier you can make credit card payments, the better off you are in the long run.”
If the City Council approves the ordinance, it would create a $75 million gap in Johnson's proposed $17.6 billion budget, which is already tenuously balanced with $480 million in borrowing to cover police settlements, and $664.2 million in new and increased taxes. Anti-administration alderpersons also have threatened to reject Johnson’s corporate head tax for a second straight year.
Asked how the $75 million gap would be filled, Dowell said, “That’s not my problem. “It’s on him to come up with the $75 million."
“Hopefully, this is a collaborative effort and we can figure this out together. But this is what happens when the communication breaks down,” Dowell said.
“He took the right from the Council to determine how the [up-front] payment would be allocated by just placing it in the budget the way he wanted to do it. He had nothing to do with [sweetening the parking meter deal]. And we were not given any indication except through the budget that his intent was to use this money in this manner. There was no conversation.”
Lee agreed that “the mayor’s got to figure out” how to plug the $75 million gap if the up-front payment from Stonepeak is not made available to be used toward next year’s pension advance.
“It’s clear in the legislation we passed for the parking meter deal that the City Council would decide that. We negotiated the transfer. That’s our purview. It’s our job,” Lee said. “This is just a pattern of his. We have not been super-engaged in the process on many things… I can’t say that I have a bad relationship with the mayor. But it’s not an ongoing dialogue.”
Last month, the Council gave final approval to New York investment firm Stonepeak Partners’ $2.53 billion bid to acquire Chicago parking meters after a negotiating team led by Dowell, Lee and Waguespack brokered a compromise to sweeten the deal for the city.
It calls for the city to receive a $75 million transfer fee at closing, 5% of net income going forward and 2% of the sale price if and when the meters are sold again before the deal ends in 2084. The compromise also reduces costly compensation the city is required to pay for every space taken out of service.
Those “true-up payments” cost the city nearly $174 million through 2025.
Stonepeak also agreed to sell Omni Air International, an airline that has provided long-haul deportation flights for the Department of Homeland Security during President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign. And the company agreed to explore creating entire non-metered city blocks as “potential electric vehicle charging stations with charging revenues shared with the city.”
