Mayor: Taste will ‘always be free’
By fran spielman City Hall reporter January 6, 2011 11:56AM
Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM
Declaring that Taste of Chicago will “always be free,” Mayor Daley said Thursday he would oppose a lone bidder’s proposal to charge a $20 admission fee to the lakefront festival and up to $65 for the biggest-name concert stage.
“I’m against that. . . .This is not the Taste of Milwaukee. This is the Taste of Chicago. It’s only a food festival,” the mayor said, referring to Milwaukee’s popular Summerfest.
“You go down there for 12 days for food and beverages. That’s what it was for. It’s not a music festival. That’s unacceptable.”
Does that mean City Hall will reject the only bid and keep the Taste and six other lakefront festivals in-house despite $7 million in losses over the last three years?
“I’m not gonna say that. . .The [selection] committee will look at it and revise it. But we’re not Milwaukee. Milwaukee has a [permanent lakefront] venue that they charge people for festivals. The Taste of Chicago will always be free,” the mayor said.
The Chicago Sun-Times reported earlier this week that the city received only one bid in response to Daley’s proposal to privatize the Taste.
It came from Celebrate Chicago LLC, a joint-venture comprised of the Illinois Restaurant Association and two of the biggest names in the production of live entertainment: Chicago-based JAM Productions and AEG Live.
AEG is one of the world’s leading concert promoters and touring companies. It produces the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. JAM Productions bills itself as the nation’s “largest independent producer of live entertainment.”
The Illinois Restaurant Association is run by Sheila O’Grady, Daley’s longest-serving chief-of-staff. The association has managed the event’s food and beverage operations for the last 27 years.
With the Taste “hemorrhaging money,” the team determined an admission fee was unavoidable.
Daley begs to differ. The way to stop the bleeding, he said, is to return Taste of Chicago to its food roots. It can still have live music. But showcase local talent. Forget about the big-name acts.
“We’re off in tangents and we’re gonna get away from tangents,” the mayor said.
“This is called a taste of food...We’re not into music. We’re not into anything else. We got into tangents and the cost kept going up. We’re gonna get it back down and do the Taste of Chicago for food and that’s all.”
In a statement, Celebrate Chicago officials said, “We are sensitive to the importance of providing affordable public programming, and our proposal contains many options, from free afternoons to ticketed events. We look forward to discussing the proposal with the review committee and are open to their recommendations.”
Until Thursday, Celebrate Chicago had been pressuring City Hall to move quickly to accept its lone bid because time is growing short to book top talent.
If the bid cannot be re-tooled—or if the joint-venture partners refuse to accept the mayor’s terms--the city would face some difficult choices.
Last fall, Special Events Director Megan McDonald warned that big-time cuts could be coming to the lakefront festivals if bids from the private sector did not “come back in the city’s favor.
“We can only do what we have the funding to do and what we’re able to raise money to accomplish,” she said then.
“That might mean moving Country Music Fest back into Taste. It might mean we merge some of our smaller music festivals and do more of a celebratory single festival that addresses all those different genres of music. . . .In a perfect world, people will still see all the same events next year, regardless of who produces them. But [the city] is prepared to do what we can to salvage as many events as we can.”
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