Taste of Chicago’s management could change
BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter/fspielman@suntimes.com December 6, 2011 2:56PM
Attendance was down at Taste of Chicago 2011. | File photo
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Updated: December 7, 2011 7:43AM
The Illinois Restaurant Association created Taste of Chicago, but that doesn’t mean the group has a lifetime lock on managing food and beverage operations at Chicago’s premier summer festival.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration is putting the contract out to bid to see if the city can get a better deal to help stop the financial bleeding at the Taste.
The Illinois Restaurant Association held the contract for 31 years — ever since the inaugural Taste was held on Michigan Avenue.
In 2010, the last year the city ran the Taste, the restaurant group was paid a management fee of $361,250.
“We’re trying to see if we can … get a better deal … We don’t want to limit ourselves just to that one contract opportunity,” Special Events and Cultural Affairs Commissioner Michelle Boone told a City Council committee Tuesday.
Does Boone believe the competition will stop the Taste from hemorrhaging money?
“That surely won’t address the total deficit, but we hope that will help address some of the loss. Opening it up for competition requires that the contractor become a bit more creative and competitive with their bids. That might be one of the ways,” she said.
Illinois Restaurant Association President Sheila O’Grady said the group has “been through the bid process before” and is “happy to compete with anybody.”
“We are the creators of the event and have worked on it for a long time. We have an expertise in management of it. [But], we fully understand why they want to test the market,” said O’Grady, former Mayor Richard M. Daley’s longest-serving chief of staff.
Last year, the lllinois Restaurant Association joined forces with two of the biggest names in the production of live entertainment — JAM Productions and AEG Live — on a proposal that turned out to be the only response to Daley’s failed effort to privatize the Taste.
It would have required Taste of Chicago patrons to pay a $20 admission fee and up to $65 a head for a music stage that drew the biggest names.
“It was a fantastic bid. Anyone who actually took the time to read it knew that, given the financial problems the event has had, exploring the market made a lot of sense. It makes sense now,” O’Grady said.
Daley rejected the admission fee and declared that the Taste of Chicago would always be free.
On Tuesday, O’Grady said she’s all for maintaining, what she called the “largest free public event in the world.” But, she argued that “cutting expenses is not going to solve the problem” at the Taste.
“New revenue needs to be brought in,” she said. “We’ve always thought that some sort of fee for pieces of the event or certain hours is worth exploring … Maybe it’s entertainment in the evenings or on weekends. Maybe it’s special concerts that would have a revenue component.”
To reverse $7 million in festival losses over the last three years — and absorb a $2 million cut in Daley’s final budget — the city last year handed the Taste off to the Park District and folded the city’s four least popular music festivals into the Taste.
It didn’t work.
The Chicago Sun-Times reported in October that Taste of Chicago will turn a bit more upscale in 2012 and get smaller and shorter — possibly cut in half — when the event is staged by the city after a drop in attendance and revenues under Park District control.
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