Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Wednesday she is “deeply disappointed” in her hand-picked Zoning Committee Chairman Tom Tunney for allowing regular customers to dine inside his Lake View restaurant in defiance of state and city orders.
Tunney faces up to $10,500 in fines. He acknowledged he “made a mistake” and promised it would never happen again after a blog devoted to police issues posted photographs of indoor dining at Ann Sather on Dec. 3.
Lightfoot made clear Wednesday that, if she has anything to say about it, the hefty fine will not be reduced by an administrative hearings officer.
“I’m deeply disappointed. I’ve known Tom Tunney for 25-plus years. I consider him a friend. He understands what he did was absolutely wrong. … He made an intentional decision to break the rules. He didn’t just break them as a business person. He broke them as an alderman,” she said.
“I’ve heard from a number of restaurateurs about this issue. The one thing they’ve consistently said to me throughout this very difficult year for them is, ‘Just be fair, mayor.’ Make sure that, whatever the rules are, that they’re enforced uniformly. That there’s no exceptions. And that, when people break those rules, that they are held accountable.”
Lightfoot intends to do just that after getting an earful from restaurant owners who are justifiably “really angry and animated” about the exception Tunney carved out for himself.
“I understand the anger and frustration because this has been such an incredibly hard year. People have bent over backwards to play by the rules — and the vast majority have been,” she said.
“At a time when they can’t afford it,” Lightfoot said, they have “put together all kinds of other precautions in their restaurants to keep their employees safe and to keep members of the public safe. This has been horrific on them. The fourth quarter is when many restaurants and others in hospitality make the lion’s share of their money for the year. And yet, they’re shut down.”
In late October, Gov. J.B. Pritzker ordered Illinois restaurants to close dining rooms again to stop a second surge of coronavirus cases.
Lightfoot initially voiced concern about the impact on Chicago restaurants, then came away from an hourlong meeting with the governor resigned to the rollback.
The mayor was asked Wednesday whether she would envision allowing Chicago restaurants to reopen their dining rooms over the next month.
She was not optimistic, citing the “slight uptick” in Chicago’s positivity rate — to 13.3%.
“We’ve got to understand better whether we’re having a Thanksgiving bump or not,” the mayor said.
A little help for the Cubs
Meanwhile, the City Council’s License Committee threw yet another bone to Chicago restaurants fighting for survival.
Aldermen agreed to:
• Extend expiring licenses until July 15.
• Allow sidewalk cafes to continue operating until June 1.
• Extend through the end of 2021 an outdoor dining program allowing restaurants to set up tables, tents and cubicles in the street, on sidewalks and in adjacent parking lots.
The License Committee also agreed to throw a bone to the billionaire Ricketts family that owns the Chicago Cubs. The team played its 60-game season without fans in the stands at Wrigley Field. It cost the team more than $100 million.
At the behest of Lightfoot and Tunney, aldermen agreed to amend the 2014 agreement with the Cubs to delay until 2024 the team’s annual $250,000 payment to the Cub Fund used for neighborhood infrastructure improvements.
The mayor made no apologies for the break, even after muscling her $94 million property tax increase — followed by annual increases tied to the consumer price index — through the City Council by a 28-22 vote.
“The Cubs are a business like any other business. And they’ve suffered great hardship this year as well,” Lightfoot said.
“It’s not a waiver. It’s a deferment.”
In fact, the Ricketts family suffered more than most baseball owners over the course of the shortened season that cost all of Major League Baseball $4.5 billion.
That’s because their business plan was blown up.
Besides having no fans in the stands, there also were no concerts at Wrigley, and no Cubs convention. The outdoor plaza known as Gallagher Way was empty.
And the Hotel Zachary and the Wrigleyville restaurants and 11 rooftops owned by the Ricketts family operated at 25% capacity, then 40%, before being forced to stop serving indoor patrons a second time.
