Construction may mean end of free courthouse parking
For the last few days, construction crews at the mouth of the parking garage across the street from the 26th and California courthouse have been inducing groans and whispers of the long awaited implementation of a universally dreaded proposal. Paid parking. “Really?” a woman angrily muttered to herself recently walking by the rising dust and blue hard hats.
“Do they have to do this right now?”
A spokeswoman for Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle said plans to charge motorists a daily fee at the city’s criminal courthouse garage and suburban facilities are “on hold” at the moment but also said there’s a possibility that personnel and other visitors may have to shell out the bucks for parking later this year.
“The RFP selection process has not been completed for the paid for parking program,” Kristen Mack said last week, explaining that “new gates” are being fitted at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse garage.
A member of the construction team had more to say.
“We’re putting in a machine to charge people for parking,” construction worker Augustino Villareal said Friday, pointing to the entrance and exit at the front side of what many describe as an unkempt garage.
Villareal said that after he’s done at the Southwest Side courthouse, he and fellow crew members will be headed to a Maywood and then another suburb to do similar work at those locations.
More than a year ago, the county said it would start charging $4.75 daily for parking at city and suburban criminal courthouse lots.
But the summer of 2012 came and went and the plan was never put in place.
At the time, Preckwinkle’s office estimated the county would raise $2.7 million over the last six months of 2012 by charging for parking at the county’s city and suburban courthouses.
The parking garage and nine surface lots around the city’s criminal courthouse and next-door jail — largely reserved for attorneys, judges and other courthouse staff, jurors and law enforcement — have been free for years.
Many court workers thought it would stay that way when the county remained mum.
Now with construction in full swing, the grumbling has resumed.
“It sucks,” a Cook County sheriff ’s deputy said about eventually having to pay for parking.
“We’re not getting raises and our cost of living is rising. It’s like we’re going backwards. I wouldn’t mind paying for parking as long as you give me the money to pay for it.”
A court reporter who lives in the far western suburbs predicts mutiny.
“I’ll ask for a transfer [to a closer courthouse to my home]. It’ll be cheaper,” she said. “I think a lot of people will be asking for transfers. This is crazy.”
A defense attorney, who has been coming to the 26th and California courthouse for nearly a decade, said it was absurd for the county to make money off a “filthy” parking garage that is full of “bird s----, human excrement, pigeons and garbage that’s never picked up.”
“The county needs to find more creative ways to make money,” he complained.