Almost a decade in the making — stretching all the way back to the defeated arena referendum — it should be clear that the grand plan to festoon Uptown with millions of dollars worth of new performance spaces is teetering on a knife’s edge.
All along the idea was to get taxpayers to build the new spaces, and thanks to the car rental tax hike bait-and-switch adopted several years ago, that happened. The city of Charlotte General Fund is now on the hook to pay for the spaces, per state law, the very thing local residents were told — repeatedly — would not happen. So the capital component of the original plan is busted, but limping along.
However, twinned with that capital funding concept was the idea that the Arts & Sciences Council, with help from the arts groups themselves, could raise the millions required for the operation of the spaces, thus freeing public dollars from that responsibility. This was always the dicey bit, but Charlotte being Charlotte, we plunged ahead certain that there would surely be more money around the next year than the last, until the end of time.
Well, the end of time is here.
The ASC is officially one-third short of its annual fund goal of $11m. and, more importantly, at least that far short on its drive to create a long-term endowment to help pay for the annual cost of the spaces. So, not only is money intended to fund grants for performances short for 2010, as the new spaces come on-line, money will be scarce to keep them open.
Now, add in staggering mismanagement of resources by many of the big ASC grantees — Opera Carolina turned down offers of free advertising in local pubs as they had “their own” marketing plan — and some bad luck — we’ve already noted the Blumie lost a six-figure annual sponsor as the Standford Financial Ponzi scheme collapsed — and some entities might not survive.
This stark possibility will — I believe — force a re-visitation of the plan to shift operating costs from taxpayers to the arts groups. But first, there might be a bid to delay the operation of those spaces we’ve already paid for.
