January 24, 2002 | Read Time: 1 minute
A court in Los Angeles has denied an event-planning company’s request to stop two California AIDS groups from organizing what the company described as a copycat fund-raising event.
Pallotta TeamWorks had asked the Los Angeles County Superior Court to stop the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation from staging a bicycle-riding event between the two cities in May, just weeks before the company is to run its ninth annual California AIDS Ride along a similar route. The lawsuit accused the charities of breaching contracts that the company says specifically prohibit them from holding their own bikeathons (The Chronicle, January 10).
But Superior Court Judge David P. Yaffe said that the contract provisions are not broad enough to give Pallotta TeamWorks the exclusive right to operate an AIDS ride. In addition, Judge Yaffe said that the company has “no protectable interest” under state law in the bikeathon concept.
The ruling clears the way for the Gay & Lesbian Center and the AIDS Foundation — which together have received about $40-million from the Pallotta-run bikeathons since 1994 — to organize their own event, scheduled to begin May 13. Pallotta TeamWorks, which said it will not appeal the order, plans to go ahead with its ride, set to start June 2, having found a new beneficiary: AIDS Project Los Angeles.
The Gay & Lesbian Center and the AIDS Foundation decided to stage their own event following disputes with Pallotta TeamWorks over costs for last year’s ride, and over how the ride’s proceeds are to be split between the charities and the company. The charities expect to get about half the money raised through last year’s Pallotta-run ride. In past years, the groups received as much as nearly two-thirds of the event’s proceeds.
