Still smarting from the public beating that they took after approving a 75-year lease of Chicago's parking meters after two days of consideration, the City Council made a muted effort back in June to subject asset sales to more scrutiny. Getting the Asset Lease Agreement Disclosure Ordinance on the books certainly was a step in the right direction. But as we noted at the time, there is still plenty of room for improvement.

The Asset Lease Taxpayer Protection Ordinance that Ald. Scott Waguespack (32nd Ward) introduced today is the best effort an alderman has yet produced. Nine council members have already signed onto the measure, which could force the Daley Administration to go public with future proposals before cooking up the next private plan to sell off yet another public asset. It would also limit long-term leases to 30 years if they could survive the muster of the following public scrutiny:

- 30 days before the council even agrees to go out to bid on consulting work (for the any asset worth $1 million, or more) the council would have  to hold a public hearing;
 - Assets worth more than $100 million, or with a lease that exceeds 10 years, would be subject another hearing, up to two months before a council vote;
- Then, 30 days prior to voting on any final deal, the proposed lease, documents demonstrating how the city settled on a price tag, and a full accounting of all anticipated proceeds would have to be posted online 30 days before council vote.

"This [ordinance] will really dig in and create an independent review process," Waguespack tells us, adding that it has "the teeth" lacking from the other asset sale ordinances.

Those teeth include a provision that would give the city the right to buy its assets back in five-year intervals at pro-rated prices. And the cost would be devised, in part, by a third-party that the city would be required to hire to conduct a financial analysis. Unlike the city's parking meter consultant William Blair and Co.,  the independent analyst would have no incentive to make a buck off of the deal.

Considering that the city is $520 million in the hole, the Reader's Mick Dumke ventures a guess that having these policies on the books sooner rather than later could save the taxpayers a lot of grief:

[E]ven though they've taken all kinds of hell for hastily approving the parking meter deal, most [aldermen] are glad to have the cash from it, some of which will go toward keeping the city afloat in 2010, as it did this year. " [...]

It's not hard to imagine Mayor Daley using that same argument to push another privatization deal in the coming months, or the City Council bitching and moaning as it goes along.

On that note, the Illinois Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) released some research (PDF) today that digs into the weaknesses of the Great Chicago Sell-off  (including the long-term leases of the parking meters, Skyway, and downtown parking garages) to help shape better deals for the public in the future. Aside from calling out the notoriously opaque process used to structure the deals, PIRG takes aim at the $26 million worth of no-bid contracts that the city has awarded to lawyers, accountants, and financial advisers to structure the deals, "leading to questions about the potential for conflicts of interest."

Go read the whole report here (PDF).