What a difference a few hours of sleep and a few phone calls from the mayor’s office make.

One day after shooting it down by a vote of 13 to 8, the City Council’s Finance Committee on Wednesday approved a $3.7 million settlement stemming from a drunken driving accident in River West that left a young woman paralyzed from the waist down. The vote was 22 to 3. The full Council signed off later Wednesday.

What changed the outcome? A little arm-twisting from the mayor’s office, that’s what.

“We don’t want to do anything to encourage or reward somebody who has recklessly gotten behind the wheel when they’re intoxicated and has resulted in injury,” Lightfoot said.

“Obviously, the city had some exposure there or we would have fought this case. This is a classic case of risk management. Our responsibility — not just mine, but City Council members — is to do what’s in the best interest of taxpayers. And this was a case that would have been very, very difficult for us to escape liability. We could have been looking at upwards of ten times the amount of money in a judgment had we not resolved this case.”

In future cases, Lightfoot said, she has directed Corporation Counsel Mark Flessner to be “aggressive in going after people who have created the harm.”

“We have to have a rigorous and robust risk management system. We don’t have that. I’m hoping we’re gonna be able to announce shortly who our first chief risk management officer is going to be. Then, we will be developing a system for that,” she said.

“But let’s not lose site of the fact this case doesn’t happen if that guy doesn’t get over-served. ... If the bar owners were responsible. If they had cut him off. And if he had not gotten behind the wheel of the car.”

Ald. Ray Lopez (15th) joined Aldermen Marty Quinn (13th) and Silvana Tabares (23rd) in voting “no.”

“My understanding is that a lot of phone calls and pressure was made on aldermen by the fifth floor to change their vote or not show up,” Lopez said.

“I guess people decided that they wanted to be part of the go-along gang and sided with the administration. It’s unfortunate because, yet again, the taxpayers are gonna be on the hook for people’s bad behavior. It definitely sends the wrong message.”

All but $200,000 of the $3.7 million settlement will go to 30-year-old Kelsey Ibach, one of four passengers in the car that Phillip Cho drove off a roadway and over a 25-foot embankment at the intersection of Erie Street and Union Ave. on Sept. 13, 2014.

Aldermen have unleashed their frustration that beleaguered Chicago taxpayers were left holding the bag for $3.7 million while the drunken motorist who fled the scene paid roughly $100,000 and the owner of the nightclub that allegedly over-served Cho was on the hook for only $1 million.

Retiring First Deputy Corporation Counsel Katie Hill has argued that the city’s liability — aside from its deep pockets — stems from the plaintiffs’ claim that the intersection was “improperly designed and maintained to the point where it created an optical illusion” that led Cho to “believe he was entering an expressway ramp.”

The plaintiffs further alleged that the city had “insufficient concrete barriers to prevent his car from leaving the roadway.”

The argument was bolstered by the fact that, when a bridge was removed from that location during the early 1970’s, a “concrete barrier was established across much of that embankment area, but the last bit was a metal guardrail, which was not crash-engineered,” Hill said.

“The city had been in discussions to change the barriers at that intersection since 2007. This accident occurred in 2014. It has since been repaired and there now is a crash-engineered barrier continuously across the entire area,” Hill said.

What downtown Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd) hopes will come from the settlement controversy is a commitment from the mayor to take a tougher stance against “these late-hours bars that are over-serving patrons, turning them loose on our streets, then exposing taxpayers to liability.”