Testing the Story for Understanding

The new contract also increases the daily attendance cap to 115,000 festgoers, up from 100,000. There doesn’t appear to be a major park infrastructure investment by C3 in the new contract beyond refurbishment of the tennis courts, where organizers park their vehicles during the event.

The Park District is guaranteed to receive $2 million from C3 each year the four-day festival is held, but C3 has been paying much more than that in annual fees. The city said C3 cut a check for $7.8 million for last year’s festival.

Jerry Mickelson, co-founder of Jam Productions and one of the deans of Chicago’s music scene, told the Tribune on Friday that he supports a Lollapalooza contract extension, in part because C3 Presents has shared the wealth with other venues, through aftershows and exposure for artists he represents. More than 60 Lollapalooza aftershows were scheduled across nearly two dozen Chicago venues over the weekend.

“They have created an event that is an amenity and an important part of bringing economic vitality to our city, so I’m in favor of this contract being renegotiated and extended because it’s a positive benefit to all that the city is trying to do,” Mickelson said. “The C3 folks provide many venues with aftershows. … They don’t need to be mandated to do that. They’re doing it voluntarily because they know it’s good for the city and the clubs.”

Mickelson, who claims credit for ushering Lollapalooza into Grant Park after he convinced city leaders to host Radiohead there in 2001, also wasn’t opposed to negotiations happening behind closed doors.

“You’ll never get a deal done if you have public input. That’s not the way the process works in any other city, and it wouldn’t work in Chicago,” he said.

City officials have done “a great job in protecting the city’s interests,” Mickelson said. “You’ve got pros at the table. You can’t make this an open forum. That’s really difficult to get a deal done. It might scare people away.”

Parks advocates, however, say they would have welcomed the chance for more input.

Leslie Recht, the president of the Grant Park Advisory Council, says there’s room to balance big events with the needs of the more than 100,000 people who live nearby.

“The secrecy” around contract negotiations and the exclusion of local aldermen from them “is unfortunate, because I think a lot of these things that we’re asking about wouldn’t negate Lolla or these other events necessarily, but they would be a benefit to the people who live downtown,” she said.

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“What we’ve been asking is to have various entities, Lolla and Sueños, set aside money for capital repairs and improvements in Grant Park,” Recht said, referring to Sueños, a May Latino music festival C3 was also involved in. She said that work should go beyond fixing the tennis courts to include a further pledge not to park on them, along with money to fix up sidewalks and bridges. “We think that’s reasonable, because the more you use the park the more you wear it down.”

Beyond that, she said neighbors should have access to green space during major events, and that festival organizers should provide more health tents and bathroom facilities so attendees aren’t using alleyways as toilets.

Juanita Irizarry, executive director of the advocacy group Friends of the Parks, said Monday she has not seen the new Lollapalooza contract, nor was she involved in negotiations or solicited by city or Park District officials for her group’s input.