The embattled arts center proposed for downtown Durham, it turns out, will get an encore.
The embattled arts center proposed for downtown Durham, it turns out, will get an encore.
Durham City Council members voted unanimously Monday night to extend the contract of developer American Center for the Performing Arts Associates to oversee the creation of the theater, which would be built near the Durham Bulls Athletic Park and the American Tobacco complex. The contract, which expired this month, has been extended to Feb. 10, 2005, giving the developer and City Council more time to find an operator to run the theater.
“There have been a lot of good points made as to why we should do this,” Durham Mayor Bill Bell said. “I don’t know how many people there are that support the building of a theater in downtown Durham. That’s just the constituency I get. I don’t think anything is lost by continuing the process.”
The proposed $30 million, 2,800-seat theater has seen difficulties since its inception, most dramatically when media juggernaut Clear Channel Communications, Inc., pulled out from its commitment to be the theater’s operator in August. Clear Channel would have faced the risk of shouldering any of the theater’s operating losses while paying a portion of the center’s annual profits to the city if it had become the theater’s operator.
It is still uncertain when the city will find an operator to commit to the project by the Oct. 26 deadline. Allen DeLisle, Durham’s economic development director, was hopeful that the city would receive submissions from potential operators.
“I don’t know how many entities are going to submit proposals,” DeLisle said. “What I am hearing is that we are going to have as many as four or five proposals from different operators.”
Another important deadline looms: The theater has to break ground by October 2005 or the council will have to ask lawmakers to grant yet another extension, which Bell said he would be willing to do.
“At one point in time we had an operator [Clear Channel] willing to accept the criteria we’ve laid out,” Bell said. “But we have to continue this process if we’re going to find another... if necessary we should seek the legislation to allow us to move forward.”
John Best, Jr., the council member chairing the committee on the planned arts center, said the council should keep its plans open to suggestions if it hopes to attract an operator. The council has called for a separate stage to be constructed for the American Dance Festival, which Best and others have questioned because the festival is only in Durham six weeks of the year.
“We have to make sure the city isn’t backing itself into a corner,” Best said. “We need to let companies and everybody involved bring ideas to the table.... If certain operators say that they don’t like the numbers, whether it’s for ADF or other things, these things should be considered to make the theater work. We have to make sure there’s flexibility there.”
The $30 million theater would be funded with a 1 percent increase on a hotel property tax enacted in 2002. Many Durham residents have complained the arts center would be a misuse of tax dollars.
“It’s time to move on and find a better use for the hotel property tax than this,” said Caleb Southern, a Durham resident who spoke before the council Monday night. “We have a higher crime rate than New York on a per capita basis. Why are we still talking about building a theater with no constituency when we have higher priorities such as crime prevention, quality of life and other issues? The city is attempting to remodel the bathroom when the house is on fire.”
But other local residents came out in support of the theater plan’s extension.
“We’re 11 months from the legislative deadline, and right now we’ve got a plan where the details are sketchy, but there are several operators interested,” said Michael Bacon, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “We’ve spent so much time—let’s not pull out now.”
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