HIMSS: Lights Out in Chicago

Michael Hart -- Tradeshow Week, 11/18/2009 2:27:00 PM

Sparks flew, but there was little electricity between Chicago’s McCormick Place and the Healthcare Information & Management Systems Society as the latter pulled its 2012 HIMSS Conference & Exhibition out of Chicago, opting instead for the Sands Expo & Convention Center in Las Vegas. The culprit: McCormick Place and the local electricians union.

“It’s sad, in a way,” said HIMSS Meeting Services Director Karen Malone.

The fast-growing health care IT show took place in Chicago in April for the first time in the 24-year history of the Chicago-based association’s event.

“We wanted a central destination,” Malone said. “We knew it would draw well for us, and it did.”

The only problem: invoices for electrical services that were four to eight times what exhibitors paid a year earlier in Orlando.

So, instead of going ahead with plans to return to Chicago, HIMSS will instead be held in Las Vegas Feb. 20-24, 2012.

“The Sands was very good to us,” Malone said. “They were very interested in our business and very flexible.”

That, unfortunately, was not the message HIMSS got from Chicago and McCormick Place. Malone said the high cost of exhibiting this year was a deal breaker, specifically because of the electricians and their work rules that drove up the expense.

Not by coincidence, within days of the HIMSS announcement, another major tradeshow, the triennial NPE – The Intl. Plastics Showcase, announced it was abandoning its longtime McCormick Place home for Orlando in 2012, citing the same reason: high exhibiting costs.

It wasn’t easy to leave the city where NPE had been held since 1971, said William R. Carteaux, president and CEO of the Society of the Plastics Industry, which organizes the show, but, “At the end of the day, it came down to one major issue, and that’s the cost.”

Malone said customer service – long a complaint about many labor unions in Chicago – was not the issue, it was the price.

“We heard over and over again that the electricians were nice,” she said, “but they dragged their tails. Jobs that should take two hours, they dragged out to five or six. They’ve got inefficient work rules that we ended up paying for.”

Chicago officials said they were disappointed and acknowledged that changes had to be made. Estimates were that the city would lose somewhere in the area of $150 million in visitor spending in 2012 because the two shows pulled out.

“We know we have to reinvent ourselves,” said Metropolitan Pier & Exposition Authority CEO Juan Ochoa.

Dennis Gannon, president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, said, “Is this a wake-up call? Absolutely. Is this a loss? Absolutely. … We’re going to see how we can do things a little differently.”

The union representative who spoke for the electricians, though, was more recalcitrant.

"I think HIMMS would have left anyway,” said Tim Foley, business manager for Intl. Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 134. “(They) took a parting shot when they pointed at electricians."

HIIMSS was No. 49 on the 2009 Tradeshow Week 200.