Checkmate!
The city’s policy is that if you accumulate three tickets your car can be booted. If it gets booted you have to pay off your tickets or it will be towed. If it’s towed you have to pay not only the tickets but the towing and storage fees or it will be sold, or crushed and sold for scrap. If it gets sold the city won’t even deduct the proceeds from your fees and fines–it just keeps dunning you.
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In October, Coleman announced she was going to have a meeting on the matter in her ward on Saturday, November 13. She invited officials from the Department of Streets and Sanitation to explain their policy, and she sent announcements to the media. “We expected a pretty good turnout,” she says.
But as the story grew, the significance of Coleman’s meeting and her ordinance also grew. She’d unintentionally put Daley in a box. “Shirley’s got that legislation, and he doesn’t know what to do,” says one City Hall insider. “He can’t avoid it. He has to do something.”
His father used to do something similar in the 60s and 70s with legislation independent aldermen introduced. Usually the old Mayor Daley had it buried in a committee, but once in a while he’d have his City Council flunkies rewrite and pass it to make him look good in the media.
Now it’s not that I think school officials make up these numbers, but the previous week I’d walked through Senn for the October 15 article I wrote about the proposed academy–which is opposed by virtually all of Senn’s students and staff–and I thought Duncan’s 59 percent “utilization rate” seemed low. So on Wednesday, November 17, I spent the better part of three hours walking through Senn counting classrooms. I started on the third floor and made my way to the first, looking to see how many classrooms were empty and could conceivably be used more often if a naval academy took over a wing of the school.
I found only two empty rooms that didn’t seem to have classes scheduled in them (they were called meeting rooms). All of the other empty classrooms I saw had teachers assigned to them–their names and schedules were posted on the door. Clearly, for a good part of the day a teacher was using them. I just happened to walk by when they were at lunch or class wasn’t in session.
