Chicago City Council finance committee to vote on settlements totaling over $60M in parking meter, Little Village fire cases
The Chicago City Council finance committee will vote on several settlements costing the city more than $60 million Monday.
Among the settlements is a $15.5 million payment to Chicago Parking Meters, LLC to settle three yearslong disputes. The company bought the city's parking meters for $1.16 billion under former Mayor Richard M. Daley in 2008, among his most infamous deals.
The mayor's office said the settlement is related to three disputes with the company dating back to Mayor Lori Lightfoot's decision to take some metered spaces out of service while state and city stay-at-home orders were in place during at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Lightfoot also announced in the early months of the pandemic that the city would stop ticketing cars for parking violations unless there was some kind of public safety threat to provide a measure of financial relief for drivers.
The company has sought to be reimbursed for the revenue for the thousands of spaces taken out of service, and the $15.5 million settlement is a tiny fraction of what the company had sought in arbitration, or even the amount the city's own appraiser estimated the maneuvers cost the company.
Another settlement up for a vote today is $48 million to be split by three men wrongfully convicted of setting a fatal fire in 1986.
John Galvan, Arthur Almendarez and Francisco Nanez spent 35 years in prison before they were exonerated.
The fire killed two brothers in the Little Village neighborhood; the three men claim police beat them into false confessions. Their convictions were vacated by the Illinois Appellate Court in 2022.
If approved, Galvan and Almendarez would each get $20 million from the settlement, and Nanez would receive $8 million.
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