If you’re fond of tracking multi-hundred-million civic structures (and who isn’t?), your eyes would be fixed on Texas and New Jersey, where the money is flowing like Mentos and Diet Coke.
The Dallas Center for the Performing Arts just bumped its fundraising goal from $275 million to $338 million. The Dallas Cowboys new stadium is pricing in at $1 billion. And the Giants-Jets stadium development at Meadowlands in New Jersey is likely to cost $1.3 billion.
While the sports stadiums are more gargantuan, the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts is a story with more nuance (at least for this blog). The new goal and enhanced facilities plan grew from a simple discovery — that they could afford to build what they already had in mind. Says President and CEO Bill Lively:
”When we realized that we would achieve the original $275 million,” he said, ”we were ready to make a recommendation for the board to increase the goal to build more stuff.”
Might the new goal include more endowment to cover the more-than-likely-higher-than-expected operating expenses for all this new stuff and the stuff already in the plan? Of course not. Such money will be raised more aggressively in 2009, says the article. For now, the focus is ”more stuff.”
Well, it is Texas!
Contrast & Compare assignment: Carniv… sorry, Arhst Center and the Dallas Center.
Anyone placing bets on how long it will be before we start hearing about the Dallas Ctr for the Perf Arts’ struggle to cover operating costs and appealing to the city gov’t for a bail-out? It would also be easier to raise the endowment money in the context of the initial campaign rather than going back to donors a year later and say, “Oh, by the way, all that money we raised – it wasn’t enough for us to actually operate the thing.”
Unfortunately, Texas is not alone in making the mistake of not looking at the long term endowment needs of new/revitalized arts centers.
I’m sort of speechless. The phenomenon reminds me of two things:
Thing the first: A canny entrepreneur with an ax to grind against crystal meth jump started the now famous Montana Meth Program. Millions were spent raising awareness of meth abuse among teens and chasing nascent experimenters away from use by saturating the visual media with graphic and terrifying ads. (So far, this probably isn’t a very good parallel.) The program has its critics on a variety of fronts, but the one that is relevant to this post is that for 1/10 of the annual funding for the program, a theatre in a Montana community with meth problems could have funded its children’s theatre program for a decade. It’s one thing to have a performing arts center – it’s another to have an extravagance that comes at the cost of other critical programs serving a similar need. I get the same feeling when I see a funny-but-forgettable movie that cost, oh say, five million bucks or so when I’ve been spending the week scratching for money to buy garbage cans to put outside my theatre.
Thing the second: Today at a legislative forum, our state assemblywoman mentioned that the word “billion” flows from our mouths with surprising ease these days. To illustrate her point, she noted that one billion seconds ago, it was 1959.
“Build more stuff” – well, isn’t that the American Dream?
Seriously, this is sad – they’re raising more money because they can and then they’ll find a way to use it. (“Hey! What about some more marble!) What if, instead, they used the funds to endow an arts education fund for inner-city kids? Oh there I go again…
In reading the whole article, the increase makes some sense. Mr. Lively makes the point that adding to the physical plant later gets more expensive. Having done both new construction and renovation of recent construction in theatres, if you know what you will want to add (or put back into the building plan that you cut out to reduce the initial cost) and you can get it in with initial construction, you are better off getting it up front.