Last June, they swore they’d all go down together — baseball, the arena, the arts. When voters went to the polls to vote in a referendum on a new arena for the Charlotte Hornets, a hastily assembled list of $100 million in arts and cultural projects stood in the way of a “no” vote.
But it appears that funding for those same arts projects won’t be part of the picture as the Charlotte City Council considers building a $40 million stadium in South End for the Charlotte Knights over the next few months. Leaders of the five venues that accompanied the arena on the June referendum now say they’ve either scrapped the planned projects or have more work to do before they can present viable plans to the city council.
The $41 million relocation of the Mint Museum is still considered by arts leaders to be the most viable project left over from those “bundled” with the arena on the June referendum.
But Phil Busher, public relations director for the Mint, says it could be a couple of years before the museum approaches the council for any kind of funding for a move or renovation.
“Our concern right now is to concentrate on strengthening our endowment, expanding the collection, and upgrading the exhibition schedule. It will take us a good three to four years to really accomplish that.”
Folks close to the Mint characterize the organization as divided over the location of any future move and even whether moving the museum from its present location is advisable. At the same time, they say, the organization needs time to adjust to internal staff and leadership changes.
John Moore, Director of the Afro-American Cultural Center, says that organization, which asked referendum voters to fund a $10 million expansion, now says its plans are more focused on strengthening the way the organization operates and raises money.
“Expansion in a formalized way is dead,” said Moore.
Arts & Science Council (ASC) President Harriet Sanford says that Discovery Place, which asked voters for $30 million in renovation upgrades as part of the referendum, may also be some time away from coming to the council with a solid plan that council members can buy into. The needs are real, but details are lacking.
Theatre Charlotte, a mature, well-organized arts venue, is the only one of the five to have accomplished its part of the deal. Starting last fall, leaders of the theater raised close to $200,000 for Phase I of a planned three-phase renovation and expansion of the theater slated to cost a total of $400,000.
Theatre Charlotte Executive Director Candace Sorensen says the theater can only go another year or so without needed repairs. The city’s part of the theater’s redevelopment, which would have been funded had the referendum passed, would be $200,000.
“We have shingles falling down to holes in driveway,” said Sorensen. “Without the money, we can patch things but there is only so long we can go on.”
Because the theater is privately owned, Sorensen says it is not eligible to receive money from the hotel-motel tax and would have to have been funded out of the state revenue sources that never came to be because the referendum failed. So Sorensen has no plans to go before the council to ask for money anytime in the near future.
“We are looking into other options,” said Sorensen. “So far we have been hitting dead-end alleys.”
Nothing like a formal plan for renovation of the historically significant Carolina Theatre on Tryon Street exists, though a theater preservation society manages to keep the dream of renovation alive in articles on the topic from time to time.
All this has to make voters wonder if the “bundling” of arts and cultural projects with an arena on the June referendum was just a smokescreen to buy more votes for an unpopular arena that polls showed voters would have never approved had it stood alone. (Bundling didn’t exactly work either, as the referendum failed 57-43 percent.)
The answer to that question is complex. The arts community was in transition when the decision to bundle all the projects together was made. The Mint was going through a stormy administration change, Moore had been in his job at the Afro-American Cultural Center just two months, Sanford had only recently taken the reins of the ASC and was new to Charlotte, and Discovery Place had just lost its long-time leader.
Cooler heads are now prevailing. The ASC, the umbrella organization run by Sanford that oversees funding for most of the above venues, is now taking a long-term approach to facility and renovation funding. Sanford says that’s because she learned tough lessons about the way Charlotte works from the referendum. During the throes of passion over the arena referendum, the ASC donated $100,000 to the campaign of the pro-arena forces. Now the organization is opting out of the debate over baseball completely, and risking the chance that none of the $80 million to $100 million in hotel-motel tax money the city could spend on entertainment venues will be available when it’s needed for arts and cultural facilities.
Instead, said Sanford, the ASC plans to hire a consultant to study the needs of the county’s cultural facilities over the next 25 years. Representatives of the ASC will serve on a blue-ribbon committee of 30 people from various sectors of the community that will put the facilities plan together. The results won’t be available for at least nine months, by which time council could have spent or put aside money for a baseball stadium and/or an uptown arena.
But Sanford said she’s not focusing on whether the arts will be left out, but on the lessons she learned from the failure of the referendum at the polls.
“I didn’t know Charlotte that well when the referendum failed, but what I believe I learned is that people want to be asked, they want to be involved and they care about the community,” said Sanford. “If I rush forward, will I not be a little bit guilty of some of the things they said in the referendum? What if the Mint winds up putting their building in the wrong place? You have to let that override your knee-jerk reaction to do it right now.”
Long-term planning aside, the current lukewarm level of enthusiasm from most city council members for anything that’s not round, uptown and sports-related likely puts a damper on any plans arts groups might have hatched to pressure the city for facility funding.
None of the council members we interviewed said that the city isn’t going to fund arts and cultural projects with the money. But none of the council members Creative Loafing talked to had any plans to put aside any of the hotel-motel tax money for art and cultural facility funding. Instead, they made vague references to funding the projects with unknown revenue streams that don’t yet exist, but might one day.
Instead, they focused on the need to move forward with baseball, and possibly a new uptown arena — with or without a tenant.
“The council needs to learn the lessons of the arena and pick a project that the entire community can get behind,” said Malcolm Graham, referring to the potential baseball stadium for the Knights. “We can’t wait two or three years to decide what to do.”
Even though the Hornets have left,” Graham added, “there has to be a commitment to build an arena. The council needs to look forward to how we get that done.”
Other council members likely feel the same pressure Graham does. Uptown hotels aren’t operating at anything near full occupancy on a regular basis, and some say the industry could face hotel shutdowns like those in the early 1990s. Hotel owners and operators agreed to the tax with the understanding that it would be used to build tourist attractions, but none are in the works lately. At the same time, funds from the hotel-motel tax continue to accrue.
“We are at a crossroads and whatever we are going to do to help tourism we are going to do it now,” said council member James Mitchell. “Now we are back to exploring what is the best bang for our buck.”
Council member John Tabor agrees.
“I feared that everyone would be at our doorstep saying what about us,” said Tabor. “I am an advocate that the council prioritize where we want to go,” said Tabor. “I am looking at the arena thinking this is going to happen some day. One of my top priorities is bringing more economic development to Charlotte. I think baseball and the arena helps with that. I don’t think some of the others (the arts projects) help as much.” *
This article appears in May 15-21, 2002.
