Compromise on taxi parking OK’d
Skokie Review
Compromise on taxi parking OK’d
November 8, 2007
By Kathy Routliffe
“What you’ve done has left me almost speechless, and you know how hard that is.”
Skokie taxi driver Mike Decker might have been speaking for a majority of the dozens of Skokie taxi drivers in Skokie Village Hall Monday night when he addressed board members during their session.
The board had just unanimously approved a loosening of the residential taxi cab parking ban they’d put in place last August.
The change, introduced by Trustee Randall Roberts, will allow drivers who have parking pads in the rear of their homes to park on them. It should also allow close to two-thirds of the village’s cabbies to park legally on their own property, Roberts said; either on a pad, or in a garage.
And, with both commercial and municipal parking lots across the village available to drivers who don’t have either garage or pad, “this … would go a ways towards giving almost every driver a chance to park close to their homes,” he said.
Decker and other drivers and their supporters have been asking trustees to reverse the ban, and return to previous regulations that allowed one taxicab to legally park in a residential block.
Roberts’ parking pad amendment piggy-backed on an earlier motion he made, to consider opening Skokie’s four municipal lots to long term parking by cab drivers.
Allowing cab drivers to park in municipal lots at a monthly cost of $10, was one of five legal alternatives Assistant Village Manager John Lockerby listed in his Monday report to the board. He and other village officials have previously backed the other four: renting garage space, parking at low or no cost in the Skokie Swift 24 hour parking lots south and north of Dempster Street; making arrangements with businesses in commercial zoning districts to park in their lots; or parking in industrial zones, either in private lots or on the street.
His report also listed the results of a survey which drivers themselves helped disseminate among Skokie cabbies. Answers from at least 59 of an estimated 88 resident drivers showed that 20 percent had garages, and 27 percent of respondents have parking pads.
Last month Mayor George Van Dusen had directed Lockerby and other village staff to research whether village owned properties could be used for overnight cab parking . He and Lockerby also met several times with leaders of the drivers, and representatives of two supporting groups, the American Friends Service Committee and the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago.
Those two groups worked together to launch the Taxi Worker Organization Project, which helped coordinate discussions, and two rallies during separate October board meetings.
“I know there are people who think there should be no exceptions, but I think this exception is justified,” Roberts said when he introduced his amendment. The reasons he gave — including the fact that many cab drivers have only their taxi for personal use as well, and the long hours cab drivers experience while serving people such as Skokie’s senior citizens — echoed objections many cab drivers have given the village since they began protesting the village code change.
Trustees backed Roberts’ amendment unanimously. Trustee Michael Gelder was not at the meeting.
Although Decker and fellow driver representative Ilyas Sayed, joined other drivers in thanking the board, they both urged Skokie officials to continue to work with them to find more parking alternatives, something Van Dusen indicated he would direct staff to do.
Many still want a return to the one cab per block regulation erased by the board in August. And, although they acknowledged the possibility of parking in lots across Skokie, many pointed out this would still leave many families bereft of an easy-to-reach car in cases of emergency. And they echoed Sayed’s contention that taxi drivers walking home from such lots would be at risk of attack and robbery for their fare money.
“I have a pad, so this helps me,” Monticello Avenue resident Shahid Syed said. “But I am still concerned about drivers who don’t have pads or garages.” He suggested that the village at least consider allowing taxi drivers to park on their own blocks during cold winter months.
The board’s decision does appear to have put on hold plans drivers had to lodge unfair housing complaints against the village with the federal Housing and Urban Development department.
“I think the basic feeling of everybody is that the village is trying to find solutions,” community activist Gail Schechter.
However Schechter, executive director of the Interfaith Housing Center of the Northern Suburbs, said she would keep copies of the complaints that drivers handed to her before Monday’s meeting.
Each of the dozens of individual complaints charged that Skokie was engaging in housing discrimination against people of color by enforcing the parking ban. Schechter, who is a licensed HUD representative, said the reasoning rests on the fact that all but a few of the cab drivers who live in Skokie are people of color, including people of Pakistani and Indian origin, many of whom are Muslim and some of whom are Hispanic.
Schechter said she first considered the possibility of lodging complaints when she first from leaders of the drivers that nearly all of the drivers are immigrants. She checked with HUD officials who told her that if drivers could prove that the village’s cabbie population was predominantly people of color or of different national origin, such a complaint might be justified.
Even if the ban’s intent wasn’t discriminatory, if separate groups of people are effectively hurt by it, it could be held to have a disparate impact on those groups, Schechter said.
Posted on November 8th, 2007 by test
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