We have to confess that anytime we hear a bureaucrat or elected official talk about parking in or around Uptown, our ears perk up – because that can mean a land deal is in the works. 

So we paid attention when Park Ridge’s Economic Development Director Kim Uhlig said that she wants to make sure Park Ridge has enough parking spaces for all those visitors who regularly clog the streets and sidewalks of Uptown.  Or maybe she means all those visitors that Uhlig hopes will be clogging the streets and sidewalks once she starts marketing Uptown to the traveler-filled hotels in the communities surrounding O’Hare. 

In any event, the City has embarked on an Uptown “parking inventory” designed to identify all of the available parking spaces in Uptown.  Uhlig wants City staff to have its recommendations ready by September 1, even though the effects of the Target Area II redevelopment – with its underground and surface parking – will not be known by then, which would seem to make any “recommendations” now about available Uptown parking premature at best.

So what’s the real point of this exercise?  We’re not sure, but it’s beginning to smell a lot like the first step in a process of justifying the City’s buying up of more private land from one or more “lucky” – a/k/a “well-connected” (a/k/a Friends of Frimark?) – owners, based on some cooked up projections of our future parking needs. 

And not just buying up more private land but also leasing more private land, also from “lucky” owners like SCH Real Estate, LLC [pdf], with whom the City Council voted (at its May 19th meeting [pdf]) to renew a lease for 50 parking spaces in the South Fairview “permit” lot for another year at $500 a space, or $25,000 a year.  Interestingly enough, the City rents 32 spaces from the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists for a mere $4,500, or a shade over $140 per space. 

Why the big difference? We don’t know for sure, but we have to wonder if the fact that one of SCH’s two owners is Bill Scharringhausen [pdf], reportedly an old friend of Mayor Howard “Let’s Make A Deal” Frimark, has anything to do with it?  Or that SCH’s registered agent is attorney Patrick D. Owens, a member of the prominent Park Ridge law firm of Owens, Owens & Rinn headed by Jack Owens, the go-to guy for local zoning and land deals?  That firm and its partners contributed at least $1,750 to Frimark’s mayoral campaign fund, so one can imagine that their phone calls to 505 Butler Place get returned. Promptly.  

Never mind that, as can be seen from the figures in a May 8, 2008, memo [pdf] from City Finance Director Diane Lambesis to the City Council’s Finance & Budget Committee, the City may actually be losing money on the new SCH lease deal because it is projecting $1,000 less in revenue than it will be paying in rent.  And that’s before the cost of the liability insurance the City, in the lease [pdf], committed to maintain on the property that also covers SCH, as well as the cost of City staff actually doing the work of operating the parking lot, is figured in.  But what the hey, its only the taxpayers’ money!

We understand that the City has been leasing these parking spaces from the Scharringhausens for quite awhile now, although this appears to be the first year that the lessor is SCH instead of some other Scharringhausen-related entity.  So it looks like the taxpayers have been helping carry this appreciating asset on the Scharringhausen books for some time – and will likely continue to do so until Uptown Redevelopment south of the tracks goes forward and a willing developer comes up with the right price for them to cash out big-time. 

Or maybe Frimark will offer them the “right price” if he can’t lock up his favorite location du jour for the proposed big new cop shop: the freshly-defunct Napleton auto dealership property.  After all, with the other tax dollar giveaway ol’ “Let’s Make A Deal” negotiated (for Napleton’s original Cadillac dealership at Northwest Hwy and Meacham) having cratered, don’t Park Ridge taxpayers deserve yet another opportunity to bail out Frimark’s buddy and benefactor, Bill Napleton?   

Any way you cut it, it sure sounds like a mighty sweet deal for the Scharringhausens.  But when you’re “lucky” enough to be a friend of Frimark, sweet deals just seem to come your way.