The current issue of CITY EDITION has an essay I wrote on the CenterStage project. After yesterday’s confirmation that Performing Arts Center Version 2.0 is still very much a private party on the public dime — now with new, improved brass band and parade!! — the piece is more pertinent than ever. Here it is:
“Why We Can’t Allow ‘CenterStage’ to Become the Sixth Street Marketplace of the Arts.”
Does Richmond ever learn from its past?
In 2003, I was among a group of arts supporters who collected hundreds of signatures from business people, restaurant owners and downtown artists. We asked the city, under former Mayor Rudy McCollum, to reconsider publicly funding the Virginia Performing Arts Foundation (VAPAF) through a meals tax hike until VAPAF’s plan for an arts center could be independently studied.
We proposed that the city put its limited cultural resources into fostering the already existing grassroots arts and music scene, as exemplified by efforts like Curated Culture’s Friday Artwalk. We were against an arts project that (incredibly) was not being run by performing arts professionals, and that asked representatives from the arts groups using the center to share 1/30th of a seat on a board of directors largely filled with lawyers, venture capitalists, grocers and energy executives.
Two years later, after the meals tax had been raised only to see the Foundation come back hat in hand for more public money, a city auditor investigated the Foundation’s private fundraising efforts. The auditor found that city council had basically written the Foundation a blank check; there was no mechanism for checking out the substance of private pledges — it was revealed that, of the $68 million VAPAF was claiming to have “raised,” it could really only account for $17 million.
VAPAF’s previous executive director was clearing a $300,000 annual salary throughout all of this, but somehow necessary funding never trickled down to the performing arts companies themselves — Richmond Symphony, Richmond Ballet, among others. These companies have since had to ask for charitable handouts from the Community Foundation to stay afloat.
Even worse was the fate of the tax money. In its inept attempts to build a publicly-funded, privately-run downtown arts center, the Virginia Performing Arts Foundation:
- wasted more than $20 million dollars in public and private dollars to tear down a building, leave a hole, and then fill in the hole.
- never commissioned a independent feasibility study.
- claimed to have “raised” $68 million at the same time it had little more than $1 million in the bank.
- left the Carpenter Center boarded-up for years by squandering the historic theater’s $3 million endowment.
Newly elected Mayor Wilder seriously questioned the Foundation when he got in office. “This was supposedly a privately funded thing,” he told STYLE WEEKLY. “That all you needed was a little seed money from the public. Now you’ll find that two-thirds of the money that will be generated, if they are counting, will be public when you count the federal, when you count the state and the city. [This occurred] without the city or any locality or any of the government officials having any say-so as to what happens. How anything like that could have gotten off the ground in the first instance is beyond me.”
Me neither, Mr. Wilder. So how shocking to learn that, after brokering a deal in January, VAPAF is about to get $23 million MORE in Richmond tax dollars, not to mention total control over Richmond’s non-profit performing arts community — all with the mayor’s blessing.
(Just to contrast this endless cash flow to the private Foundation, First Fridays Artwalk founder Christina Newton revealed in a recent interview that the city has given her organization a whopping $4000 over the past few years, all while trying to take credit for her idea, which did not need millions in public subsidy to succeed — just art and artists.)
Other than a new and expensive consultant-derived name (CenterStage), and more unverifiable promises of private dollars, nothing has changed other than Wilder’s approval. The CenterStage website has a “Frequently Asked Questions” section that claims to address citizen concerns about the project. Among the concerns not addressed: How fundraising pledges will be verified in the future… who will pay for cost overruns… which local arts professionals will be asked to (finally) solicit ideas… why there is no mention of the oversight committees that were to be put into place to ensure community involvement, diversity and accountability… and the exact date that the Carpenter Center’s title will be transferred to the city (which was the linchpin of the mayor’s “deal” with the Foundation).
Given the past history, these are not frivolous questions. No one who claims to “support the arts” can defend the private Foundation not addressing them as they come to the city again for more tax money. Any reasonable steward of our public resources would demand that VAPAF open up its house, start answering the real questions surrounding its project and begin an active collaboration with the greater arts community it now wants to desperately attach itself to.
Anything less will be the same old boondoggle in a brand new pricey package, and one more example of how Richmond is unable to learn from its own history.