Save Richmond

The mayor’s performing arts committee held its first meeting on Friday, an event the Richmond Times-Dispatch summarizes as “symbolic.” In light of this whopper news , one wonders if this new committee’s final report will even be necessary:

Richmond Mayor L. Douglas Wilder floated a multimillion-dollar plan to rebuild schools and other city facilities at a 70-minute, closed-door meeting with a dozen business and civic leaders yesterday.

The plan, which could be a centerpiece of his legacy as mayor, could mean raising as much as $200 million through complicated financing that seeks to address concerns the city is bumping the ceiling of how much it can borrow, according to senior City Hall officials.

The officials confirmed details of the plan only on condition of anonymity because they are still reluctant to discuss the plan officially.

The money would go for a citywide school building and renovation program, focused on the oldest and most run-down schools, as well as streets and other infrastructure, the sources said.

The plan also would use meals-tax money originally intended to pay the city’s share of a downtown performing-arts center as a source of revenue to repay the borrowing. The borrowing, in turn, could be used to pay for the renovation and expansion of the Carpenter Center, the sources said.

But the performing arts committee meeting was significant for at least one reason: Negative nabobing questions were asked of the Virginia Performing Arts Foundation that normally only irresponsible bloggers bother with. Like:

“What is the annual operating budget for all this?”

and

“What was the sampling data on that Times-Dispatch poll that indicates widespread support for the performing arts center?”

and

“Why can’t we just start on renovating the Carpenter Center immediately?”

The committee didn’t get answers to those first two questions. And since nearly half of the members are themselves Foundation board members or afflilated agents — Jim Ukrop, Thomas Farrell, Jean Boone, David Fisk — it was embarrassing that no one knew. [According to estimates filed with the mayor's office, the Foundation's annual projected revenues are $7.3 million with expenses of $8 million, resulting in an annual deficit of nearly $700,000 ; that infamous T-D poll can be explained here ].

Instead, the presentations from the Foundation that the committee members (and silent guests) were treated to on Friday were the same kind of booster montages everyone in attendance must have seen a dozen times or more. The 2001 AMS study was hauled out again as justification for everything— but the members (at least four of them) must be aware this is an outdated consultant’s report rife with errors, based on the Foundation’s former plan that included a home for TheatreVirginia , not a 1,200-seat music hall that even many within the Richmond Symphony regard as too small for an orchestra. No, this project has never been treated to an independent feasibility study and there’s probably a good reason for that.

In response to the third question, about the reopening of the Carpenter Center, VAPAF presenters John Bates and Michele Walter didn’t happen to mention the Carpenter’s account statement or dwell on the fact that the hall’s $3 million endowment has shrinked to nearly nothing under the Foundation’s care. Instead, they talked exclusively about the inadequacy of the Carpenter Center as a performance space— although Walter admitted that the nearly 80-year-old venue was structurally sound. “They made things to last back then,” she said.

With Wilder’s newly unveiled funding initiatives in the forefront of everyone’s mind, the doomy duo of Bates and Walter expressed extreme discomfort about simply renovating and expanding the Carpenter without also building the Foundation’s planned music hall because, according to them, everything about the VAPAF project is so tied together. And also because they’ve done so much work on the plan as it is already envisioned. Mr. Bates pointed to two stacks of papers in binders, lying in the corner of the Foundation office, as proof of that assertion— ah yes, Brad may be gone but his spirit of salesmanship lives on.

Thanks to committee chairman Robert Grey for reminding everyone present of the impending one-year anniversary of the Carpenter’s closing. (So why isn’t Joel Katz sitting at this table? ) The new performing arts committee now has a year to decide what to do —and I suspect that the PAC’s findings will fall in line with the mayor’s ambitious new school funding initatives (which could also include the Carpenter’s renovation). But that’s way too long to wait and wonder while this valuable downtown venue sits dark.

It guess it bodes well that some on this new performing arts committee are willing to ask the tough questions. But the problem on Friday wasn’t the questions — those have been posed already , many times over — it was the same old answers and non-answers.