On Friday, Ald. Steven Bernstein (4th) got what he wanted — a Homecoming parade for Northwestern.

Though Bernstein and Ald. Ann Rainey (8th) voted to deny NU’s annual request to shut down Sheridan Road for the parade, he said Sunday that he probably wouldn’t have done it if he thought the rest of Evanston City Council would join him.

“I knew the parade was going to go forward,” Bernstein said. “If we had succeeded, I wouldn’t have been happy about it.”

Ald. Edmund Moran (6th) said Sunday he thought the debate about the Homecoming vote was “silly”and that threatening to block the parade wasn’t the way to persuade NU administrators to contribute more to the city.

“If the city’s ever to make any progress in (negotiations with NU), we’re going to need a different lineup on City Council,” Moran said. “The current so-called efforts are all directed toward the (aldermanic) election in April.

“(NU’s) basic mission is to own and operate a university, not to give Evanston money when it needs it.”

Bernstein said he didn’t want to hurt the students by voting against the parade, but instead wanted to show university administrators that he is serious about negotiating.

And he said if NU administrators refuse to talk with city officials about the contributions, City Council will find some other way to force them to contribute.

For more than 100 years, city officials and NU administrators have been at odds regarding the university’s role in improving the financial condition of Evanston.

Several aldermen and Evanston residents have said that NU — which is exempted from paying property taxes by its 1851 charter — doesn’t pay its fair share of the cost of city services.

And in the March primary election, more than 80 percent of voting Evanston residents supported an advisory referendum proposing that aldermen negotiate with NU for payment for municipal services the university receives.

The council in July formed a three-person negotiation team — composed of Bernstein, Rainey and Ald. Arthur Newman (1st) — to talk with NU administrators about the referendum.

But little progress has been made because the city and the university have been unable to agree whether to hold public or private meetings.

After a Nov. 5 Rotary Club luncheon, University President Henry Bienen told The Daily that NU will make no additional contribution to the city’s budget.

But Bernstein said the council’s requests for a contribution cannot be ignored.

“We will extract that which we can extract from the university so it will become a fair share,” he said. “(The negotiation team) will accomplish our purpose.”

He said the negotiation team has discussed proposing a “head tax” on university employees if NU refuses to cooperate.

The tax would be imposed on institutions with more than a certain number of employees and would be based on the expense of having that many cars traveling city streets, he said.

The team also has talked about reviewing the unwritten agreement that allows NU employees to park at Ryan Field and take a shuttle to campus, he said.

According to a city ordinance, employers are supposed to provide parking either on site or less than 1,000 feet away from the building, he said.

Bernstein also said NU administrators could make non-financial contributions to the city that would help Evanston just as much as a lump-sum donation.

He said NU faculty members and students could work on consulting projects that would save the city thousands of dollars. These types of programs could eliminate Evanston’s need to hire expensive professional consultants to review building plans or study social trends within the city, he said.

Bernstein also said NU could pay to operate the Evanston firehouse that includes NU in its jurisdiction, or the university could renovate or rebuild the Civic Center.

He said he’d even put NU’s name on the building if the university paid for it.

In spite of all the controversy between the city and NU, Bernstein said he doesn’t hold students accountable for the actions of their administrators.

“The students have done and continue to do good things for the city,” he said. “They don’t have the ability to do more.”