One thing about Chicago: even in the throes of a bone-chilling winter, it ain’t boring. There’s always something to keep us from dropping into hibernation. The Emanuel residency circus, for example, or the unruly turn of events at the usually staid Cultural Center. Who could’ve predicted that Department of Cultural Affairs head Lois Weisberg, an 85-year-old civic icon and Daley family favorite, would be going out with guns blazing this week rather than making a graceful exit along with the mayor when his term ends in May? Or that both she and the city would be blaming their divorce partly on that 40-year-old set of anti-patronage victories known as the Shakman Decrees?
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Weisberg is clearly pissed at Daley, who, she’s said, made some major decisions affecting her fiefdom without bothering to consult her—first to privatize and possibly start charging admission for the city’s celebrated summer festivals and then to merge DCA with the Mayor’s Office of Special Events. Weisberg opposed all of the above and took umbrage at not being in on the deliberations. But it wasn’t until after the announcement of a major DCA layoff in December—20 jobs cut from a department that had already lost nine in October—that she said she’d had enough and would be leaving on February 1.
Weisberg refused to talk to me for this column, but on January 20 she spoke with WBEZ music blogger Jim DeRogatis, who was on this story before anyone else and has tenaciously reported what he saw as part of a possible scheme to ensure that the festivals got privatized. Weisberg told DeRogatis that she couldn’t guarantee that things would be all right at the DCA even if she were to stay on there. “I haven’t got the faintest idea if it will work or not,” she said of the city’s anti-Shakman shell game. “And not only do I not know if it will work, I can’t explain it. It’s so hard to explain. It doesn’t make sense.” (The entire interview—in which Weisberg also criticizes the Mayor’s Office of Special Events, headed by another Daley family friend, Megan McDonald—is posted on DeRogatis’s blog and well worth a read.) The complexities of having to operate under Shakman make it, Weisberg said, “one of the worst things that ever has happened to the city.”
Meanwhile, all but one of MOSE’s city jobs remain intact; as of January 1, they were moved to what is now called the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events—even though MOSE, more than DCA, has been considered to be, as DeRogatis put it, a “political dumping ground.”
