Chicago’s parking-meter concession, read from the documents the city itself posts: a 75-year lease effective February 13, 2009, priced at exactly $1,151,355,186 up front — and since then the city has paid the meters’ operator $160,953,305 in audited “true-up” payments for closing or changing metered spaces, by the City Council’s own financial office. The operator’s audited statements, filed with the city in April 2026, report $188.7 million in parking revenues for 2025 — and something newer: on December 30, 2025, the company’s owners agreed to sell their interests in it — a change in control that, as the audit states, requires City Council approval and had not received it by the audit’s April 24, 2026 cutoff. Every dollar figure on this page comes from a named public document, every document is linked on this page, and the arithmetic this page adds — date math and check-sums — is disclosed in the method notes at the end.
COFA true-up report + CPM audited financial statements (filed with the city April 27, 2026) + the Amended and Restated Concession Agreement, each read in full · retrieved August 17, 2026The terms, from the primary documents
The concessionaire’s own audited statements state the deal’s skeleton: Chicago Parking Meters, LLC leased the metered-parking system for a 75-year term beginning February 13, 2009, for a purchase price of $1,151,355,186 — $1,146,255,186 of it booked as the concession rights, which the company amortizes at $15,283,402 a year for 75 years. The Amended and Restated Concession Agreement anchors the far end: its remaining-value formula counts the days “to February 29, 2084.” The last full calendar year of the term is 2083 — seventeen and a half years are gone, and more than 57 remain. The system covers roughly 36,000 metered spaces, per the Council Office of Financial Analysis, and the company’s members are Morgan Stanley-affiliated infrastructure partnerships (50.100 percent) and Deeside Investments (49.900 percent), as the audit records them.
The true-up ledger: what the city has paid the operator
- 2009$533,290
- 2010$1,658,036
- 2011$14,134,842
- 2012$26,738,664
- 2013$14,617,084
- 2014$6,481,150
- 2015$8,637,891
- 2016$15,740,662
- 2017$21,736,219
- 2018$17,371,527
- 2019$11,037,684
- 2020$6,250,836
- 2021$6,722,885
- 2022(unused settlement credits applied)$0
- 2023$1,702,107
- 2024$7,590,428
When the city temporarily closes metered spaces — the Council office’s examples are events, construction, and weather parking bans — or uses its reserved powers over rates, hours, and meter counts, the concession agreement requires it to reimburse the operator for the lost revenue. The Council Office of Financial Analysis compiled the audited payments above from CPM’s financial statements: $160,953,305 from the deal’s 2009 start through fiscal 2024, peaking at $26.7 million in 2012, with 2022’s zero reflecting unused settlement credits. COFA’s report also records that a 2013 renegotiation of the reimbursement formula saves what it estimates at $25 million a year, and that the 2025 resolution of CPM’s COVID-era claims — a $15.5 million settlement payment plus a reported $9.7 million to resolve the legal claim — totaled $25.2 million. The operator’s own 2025 audit, a separate document, recognizes $11,817,498 of true-up revenue for 2025, a year COFA’s paid-through-2024 table does not yet cover; the two documents agree on 2024 to the dollar.
What 2025 looked like inside the meters
The audited statements the operator must file with the city each spring report, for calendar 2025: parking revenues of $188,698,712 — a figure that by the audit’s own notes includes the $15.5 million city settlement and the $11.8 million of true-up revenue — against $160,945,228 in 2024. Net income was $72,770,043, and the company distributed $71,336,940 to its members during the year, against $17.1 million the year before. It carried $1,068,376,607 of principal on its notes at year-end — paying $61.0 million in interest during 2025 — and in September it issued $360 million of new notes, using the proceeds to repay maturing debt, pay transaction costs, and fund a distribution to its members, as the debt note states.
The sale, as the audit records it
The newest fact in the file is one sentence in the audit’s organization note: on December 30, 2025, the Morgan Stanley-affiliated partnerships agreed to sell their interests to an unrelated third party that will also purchase Deeside — the whole company. The audit states this is a change in control under the agreements and “requires approval by the Chicago City Council, which has not yet occurred.” The audit’s subsequent-events review runs through April 24, 2026; whether and how the Council has acted since is outside these documents’ dates, and this page claims nothing beyond them.
Known limits
This page reports what the documents record and takes no position on the deal’s wisdom; where a characterization appears, it is a named document’s own. COFA’s report describes the 2009 Inspector General estimate that the city received nearly $1 billion less than the system’s projected value, and describes a 2024 audit showing CPM had “generated $1.97 billion in income, surpassing its initial investment in less than 10 years” — both reported here as COFA’s statements. Figures from different documents are never summed: the true-up table is COFA’s compilation of audited payments through 2024, and the 2025 figures are the operator’s audited results, kept apart. Meter counts, rates, and revenue projections beyond these documents are not reprinted here.
- Sources Council Office of Financial Analysis, Aldermanic Request: Parking Meters — “True Up” Payments (2025), the source of the 2009–2024 audited-payments table; Chicago Parking Meters, LLC audited financial statements for 2025 and 2024 (filed with the city April 27, 2026 under Section 8.1(c) of the concession agreement); and the Amended and Restated Chicago Metered Parking System Concession Agreement (June 5, 2013, with amendments), all posted by the city and each read in full at retrieval on August 17, 2026. The city’s asset-lease agreements page hosts the annual filings.
- Counting The true-up table is reprinted exactly as COFA publishes it, and its total is recomputed here. Term arithmetic — years elapsed and remaining — is ours, measured from the audit’s February 13, 2009 Concession Start Date to the agreement’s February 29, 2084 anchor. Dollar figures are quoted from the documents without adjustment, and figures from different documents are never combined in any total.
Compiled by KCM Desk from the city’s posted documents, retrieved August 17, 2026. If you spot an error, corrections come first.