Quick Hits – January 12, 2023 – The consequence of not foreseeing the consequences continued

Sooner or later, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences. – Robert Louis Stevenson

Let’s continue with our failure to foresee consequences theme, particularly as it applies to the post-pandemic era.

The Paramount wants a $5.5 million handout for making bad decisions?

Yes they do! And it looks like, with just $13 million in COVID relief funds remaining and so many downtown Aurora small businesses suffering so much more, the rubber stamp Aurora city council is simply going to hand it over to an organization that neither needs nor deserves it.

To be fair, some of the Paramount’s bad decisions were the result of “conservative” Mayor Richard Irvin’s rabid propensity to enforce the pointless COVID mitigations just because he contracted a bad case of the disease.

Of course, he later denied threatening those businesses with closure as he was in the process of coming in a distant third in the 2022 gubernatorial primary despite a $50 million cash infusion from Illinois billionaire Ken Griffin.

And I used to love The Paramount, too!

Just as it was with Elgin Community College’s Blizzard Theatre, my wife and I looked forward to driving to downtown Aurora to see a new show. But now, unless there’s an act I’m utterly dying to see, I won’t set foot in the place.

Some of that reticence is The Paramount’s post-Covid shift away from any act that might be considered the least bit controversial and their overreliance on their increasingly tedious Broadway Series.

“Groundhog Day” was terrible, “Newsies” was mediocre at best, the “Cabaret” performances were lacking, and I thought “The Sound of Music” was boring when I was a kid. “The Producers” was a fantastic show, but that’s the exception that proves the rule.

And just like it is with the Blizzard, I get nostalgic thinking about some of acts we’ve seen there:

• D. L. Hughey
• Craig Ferguson
• David Sedaris
• William Shatner
• A Night With Groucho

But those kinds of shows disappeared the second they hired a diversity and inclusion director. Now it’s just bland Broadway shows that have a following, but that older customer base is slowly dying off, which certainly isn’t the best artistic business model.

The icing on the alienating your core customer base cake was their random enforcement of on-again off-again mask mandates. What could possibly go wrong with giving a volunteer staff the power and license to enforce an ill-defined and ill-advised policy?

All it took for an older black female usher to make a beeline for me was to pull my mask down to scratch my nose. Then, because “Groundhog Day” was so awful, I left the performance and went out to the lobby to read my book, removing my mask because no one was within 50 feet of me. But sure enough, as soon as an older white male usher saw me, he virtually ran over to insist that I put the mask on. I replied that I’d put it back on when he told the cops working the lobby to pull theirs back over their noses, too.

The Paramount hasn’t taken quite the attendance hit that ECC has, but their shows don’t sell out with nearly the frequency they once did. And now they want almost $6 million in government relief funds to rescue them from some truly terrible decisions and the Aurora city council is more than ready to fork it over?

Must be nice!

But Lori Lightfoot is the worst

In a purely pandering effort to prove she wasn’t Donald Trump, no one enforced those absurd COVID mitigations like soon-to-be-one-term Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Our Little Napoleon was so hell bent on prosecuting those protocols that she had the CPD roust beachgoers despite the fact that COVID can’t be transmitted outdoors.

And now that those chickens are coming home to roost, she wants to blame everyone but herself.

Major metropolitan areas are essentially the equivalent of a giant Jenga game. Remove the wrong block and the whole thing will come tumbling down – just ask the residents of Detroit and Baltimore. And one of those essential Chicago “building blocks” is its robust public transportation system. Sure, they’re prone to running at a deficit and crime was always a concern, but the CTA and RTA generally got the job done.

More specifically, on any average pre-COVID weekday, an amazing 1.5 million people boarded a train or bus to get to work or school. But by September 2022, the average daily ridership had plummeted 40 percent to just 900,000 commuters. And the perpetually cash-strapped CTA simply cannot endure the projected $360 million in lost fares.

The only reason they’ll make in through 2023 is a $390 million infusion of federal COVID relief funds, but as ridership continues to decline – and it will – all bets are off for 2024. That means the agency will have to resort to drastic cutbacks, which will have quite the domino effect on the businesses, restaurants, retail stores, sports teams, and schools that rely on their capacity to put people at their door.

Some of those losses can be attributed to a six-fold increase in CTA violent crime that started with the pandemic, which coincides with police patrols falling to a five-year low. That may not be a direct result of the pandemic, but Lightfoot has made life so difficult for the CPD that they’re short some 1,400 officers and the CTA isn’t a priority with gang members regularly shooting up the rest of the city.

At first glance, it would seem the solution to the CTA’s fiscal ills is to reinstall those officers to reverse this criminal trend, but it’s not that simple. As we discussed in part one, once you break a consumer habit, it’s almost impossible to get those customers back. In this case, it was the poorly considered “shelter-in-place” orders that made workers realize there was no need to schlep into the office five days a week.

I remember a 1995 conversation with a Chicago cabbie where I explained that, with the recent advances in 56K modems, the Loop would soon become a ghost town. But it took a plague to break the commuting habit and finally bring that prognostication to fruition – 28 long years later.

There will likely be some bounce back from the astounding 52.5 percent nationwide decrease in employees going into the office, but it will NEVER return to pre-pandemic levels. So, it doesn’t matter what the CTA or the City does to lure back those riders because they’re not coming back.

Worse yet, this new non-commuting reality is having a dire effect on the restaurants, bars, and retail shops that depended upon the mass of humanity descending on downtown Chicago every weekday. Put more simply, The Second City is going to have to entirely reinvent itself to deal with these turbulent sea changes and that ain’t gonna happen under the worst mayor in modern Chicago history.

Again, it all comes down to the failure to foresee the fallout. Politically expedient folks like Mayor Lightfoot were all too ready to prove their fealty to Governor Pointless and the anti-Trump COVID cause mitigations without bothering to consider the potential long-term ramifications of those closures. “If it saves one life, screw the economy” those self-righteous nanny-staters demanded!

But it didn’t save a single life and now the Chicago economy has taken the kind of economic hit from which it will never recover.

Now that those COVID chickens are coming home to roost in a glorious fashion, folks like Lightfoot act as if they can’t even spell the word “mitigations.” She’s certainly leaving a mess for her unfortunate successor. It reminds me of the old proverb:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost
For want of a shoe the horse was lost
For want of a horse the rider was lost
For want of a rider the battle was lost
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail

Who was it that said, “We can’t let the cure become worse than the disease?”