It looks like we were wrong about private corporation Taste of Park Ridge, Inc. (a/k/a, “Taste Inc.”) and its no-bid monopoly of the City’s premier civic event, Taste of Park Ridge (“TOPR”). And are we ever embarrassed.
What caused this change? Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s recently announced goal of privatizing Taste of Chicago.
If you read Saturday’s Chicago Tribune story (“Privatizing Taste a risky move for Daley,” Aug. 27), you know that Taste of Chicago is the latest big-ticket asset Daley wants to put on the auction block in his increasingly desperate attempt to stave off financial catastrophe as more than two decades of systemic graft and corruption are finally coming home to roost.
Who would have thought that our own Taste Inc-sters were 5 years ahead of municipal mogul Daley in figuring out how to shanghai a high-profile civic event and put money in private pockets…compliments of the taxpayers?
But while we may have beaten Daley to the privatization of our major civic food festival, there will be one big difference between how Daley and the Chicago City Council will do it versus how Frimark and the Park Ridge City Council did it.
Daley will privatize Taste of Chicago only “if City Hall gets offers that make sense.” That’s why Chicago will be looking for bidders willing to pay for the right to run that event.
Here in Park Ridge, however, the taxpayers continue to pay for the privilege of having Taste Inc. run TOPR on a no-bid basis while piling up cash ($65,000 in profits just last year alone) that its operators can now legally use for lobbying and political activity.
Ironically, in Chicago that kind of deal might be branded “graft and corruption”…once the U.S. Attorney’s Office got wind of it.
In Park Ridge, it’s just “volunteering.”