Mendoza urges Chicago to kick residential permit parking habit

Chicago is a parking-starved city addicted to residential permit parking, but it’s time to kick a habit that creates “false expectations” among motorists, City Clerk Susana Mendoza argued Friday.

On the hot seat for, perhaps, the final time at City Council budget hearings, Mendoza, the Democratic nominee for state comptroller, urged aldermen to bite the bullet and get rid of at least some of the 1,400 residential permit parking zones across the city generating 200,000 annual permits.

That’s even though the sale of permits and guests passes generates $5.7 million in annual revenue. Resident passes sell for $25-a-year. Guest passes go for a bargain, fifteen permits for $8.

“I wish we didn’t even have residential zone parking. Then it’s just, if they find a spot, they find a spot. . . . If it were my prerogative, I’d say let’s just get rid of it and not even do it,” Mendoza told aldermen.

“It’s a false expectation. People pay the $25 and, if they don’t find a spot on their own block, they get even more frustrated at you because they’re like, ‘I just paid this $25 and I still can’t park on my street because there’s just never enough parking in areas that suffer from major congestion.’ [If] you have a lot of apartments or multi-family units, it’s gonna gobble up parking spaces….Eighty percent of the time in those congested neighborhoods, they’re still not able to find a parking space.”

Mendoza urged aldermen to level with their constituents and, at least, begin the process of weaning their wards away from the permit parking habit.

“Sometimes, aldermen are quick to want to make their constituents happy because they asked for residential zone parking…[But] I would encourage, especially new aldermen to be very careful about trying to extend those. If you’re even able to convince your constituents to get rid of ’em, I would move in that direction because it doesn’t help you. All you’re gonna do it make enemies,” she said.

“Your constituents pay $25 and they think, because they paid that money, they’re gonna be guaranteed a parking spot. They also think that, if someone on the block does not have the zone sticker, just like this, the Department of Finance is going to drive out there and ticket them or the police. But clearly, the police have much bigger problems to deal with.”

Mendoza’s warning was music to the ears of Ald. Millie Santiago (31st). She called residential permit parking a “very messy” issue that’s “the No. 2 priority request” she gets on a daily basis. Most of the complaints are about the lack of enforcement.

“I have people like fighting with each other, arguing with each other, threatening each other because they don’t have a parking space in front of their house and they pay their fees,” Santiago said.

“The other issue is, people who have garages don’t use them. So, we need to do something about this because the streets belong to everybody and there’s a lot of people who are abusing the program.”

Ald. John Arena (45th) agreed that residential permit parking has been implemented in “kind of a haphazard way” and, at the very least, Chicago needs a “more cohesive plan.”

“When I get a request for it, folks are frustrated on one block. But my concern is that, if I implement it for them, then I just create the problem on the next block and it’s kind of diminishing returns as you go way from a transit center or from an L stop or a Metra stop,” Arena said.

As for Mendoza’s suggestion that Chicago move away from residential permit parking, Arena said “I agree with you 100 percent. It’s something I don’t implement very much at all because, like you said, it’s an expectation of access to public space that just doesn’t exist. So, I’m with you on that. It’s not the optimal way to manage parking.”

Residential permit parking got its start in 1979 on the streets surrounding Northeastern Illinois University — and fast became the catchall solution to Chicago’s notorious parking crunch.

In exchange for a $25 annual fee, motorists get permits that entitle them to park on residential streets where parking is banned without a permit.

In 1998, then-Mayor Richard M. Daley tried to reduce the number of zones, only to back off after a City Council rebellion by aldermen concerned about surrendering their control over residential permit parking to the city’s Revenue Department.

Amendments allowing permit parking zones to cover one block instead of three and reducing to 65 percent the share of city sticker owners in the area who must approve a zone salvaged the mayor’s ordinance. The annual fee was raised from $10 to $25.

Daley’s original plan called for existing zones to sunset after five years with an option for a three-year extension, only if 75 percent of sticker owners signed a petition. The reforms were the product of a mayoral task force intent on creating as many as 10,000 additional parking spaces in Chicago.

Eight years later, aldermen climbed aboard the get-tough bandwagon, fueled by their anger about the parking permit for real estate agents, social workers and home health care providers.

They warned that the new permit – effective from 9 a.m. until 9 p.m. on weekdays and between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. on weekends-would gobble up spaces normally reserved for area residents and fuel demands from other professionals for a similar parking perk.

They argued that Chicago was blanketed with far too many residential permit parking zones – and that the designated areas were eliminating the local spaces that neighborhood businesses needed to survive.

No changes were ever made.

In 2009, then-City Clerk Miguel del Valle led a parade of aldermen in once again demanding that Chicago kick the residential permit parking habit.

Once again, the City Council did nothing to curb the parking-starved city’s addiction to residential permit parking for fear of a backlash from constituents who have grown dependent on the $25-a-year permits.