Officially, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley says he is in no hurry to privatize Midway Airport. "It’s a long way off," he told the Sun-Times Fran Spielman yesterday afternoon. "You have to make sure the market is there.” His concern, aside from his eroding political capital, was the price fetched for Gatwick Airport in London. Originally expected to attract around $2.9 billion, it sold for $500 million less than that.

But let's be clear: Folks on City Hall's fifth floor will try to sell off Midway when the time is "right." The city's main consultant on privatization issues, Mayer Brown's John Schmidt, told Crain's that the Daley administration plans to inform the Federal Aviation Administration by February 1 how it plans to proceed. Schmidt later said he expects a deal by the end of 2010. And in his conversation with Spielman, Daley said that selling off the airport would be "very progressive" because "you’re rebuilding your city — both with [physical] infrastructure and human infrastructure.”

In October of 2008, the city council voted 49-0 to approve the Midway deal after being given "barely a week" to review the fine print. But the deal, which would have generated $2.5 billion, broke down when private investors could not raise the necessary capital. At the time, Ald. Tom Allen (38th Ward) called it a "blessing in disguise." Following the parking meter debacle and the administration's draining of the long-term asset reserves created by that deal, it's not hard to see why.

To be fair, selling off Midway is a different animal than leasing the parking meters. The price of fuel, the growth of high-speed rail, and the immense strain air travel places on the environment could lead to a decline in mass aviation in the coming decades, especially at the regional level, which Midway primarily services. (The parking meter system, by contrast, represents a crucial planning tool that the city gave up.) But it's the manner in which the Daley administration rams through these proposals -- with help from connected friends and with little regard for honest, democratic debate -- that's so toxic.

An asset sale review bill was supposed to protect against this behavior, but it remains to be seen if enough aldermen will buck the mayor to pass such an ordinance. Meanwhile, the up front-payoff won't solve the city's underlying financial instability. And selling away public assets, thereby shifting public responsibility into private hands, delegitimatizes government itself with no discernible collective advantage.

Daley says he's not in a rush -- and that's a good thing. We doubt the public is either.