In his Wall Street Journal column today, Tom Frank contrasts Washington Republicans' kvetching about the so-called "Chicago Way" with the fact that the city has become ground zero for the conservatives' beloved privatization movement.  After recalling the parking meter fiasco in all its frustrating glory, Frank concludes:

It may not fit the myth, but that's the real Chicago way. Sell off public property without public scrutiny. Prohibit public input on an essential public service. Rationalize the whole thing, as Mr. Daley's administration has done, by insisting that government can't run such things as well as the private sector can.

And then, when the money runs out, privatize something else: The water supply, maybe. The sewer system. An airport or two.

Indeed.

The parking meter deal also received some recent attention on the national level from Reuters' Felix Salmon.  Back on November 23, he penned a blog post headlined "Chicago's Good Parking Meter Deal" in which he embraced what former city inspector general David Hoffman describes as the "impossibility argument":

[T[he city was politically incapable of raising the parking-meter rate itself. This was clear as far back as December, when I wrote that “this parking-meter initiative is the municipal equivalent of a CEO hiring McKinsey to come in and recommend job cuts: it’s a way of doing what needs to be done while somehow managing to blame someone else”. When the deal went through, Chicago parking meters were charging just 25 cents per hour: all the proof you’d ever need that the city, on its own, was incapable of charging a market-clearing price for on-street parking.

In a follow-up post, Salmon expounded on this theory a bit more:

The only way of baking in these price hikes was for the city government to tie its own hands — which is exactly what it did. And more broadly, it’s possible that the only way it could tie its hands in this manner was precisely by pushing the bill through in a rushed and bullying manner. (It’s not the first time that’s happened in Chicago, and it won’t be the last: it’s called politics.) Maybe doing the deal in this way was the only way a deal could be done at all.

Salmon's basic point is this: Amid the uproar we saw earlier this year (after the rates were hiked), if the mayor and aldermen had still retained control of the meters, they would have surely buckled and returned the rates to their previous level immediately.

But this misses a crucial point: The city wouldn't necessarily have raised the rates as suddenly or drastically as LAZ Parking chose to do.  As Frank points out in his piece, the company's obvious objective was to "maximize their return."  By contrast, the city could have devised a more gradual schedule of hikes (as other cities have done).  They also could have shielded themselves from the voter backlash by tying some of the new revenue to public transit improvements, thereby engendering support and enthusiasm among the ever-growing CTA ridership.

A foward-thinking mayor -- one not being advised by investment bankers, for instance -- would have come up with a creative plan for the meter system and convinced skittish aldermen to come along.  Unfortunately, that's not what happened.