CRA Develops Yet Another LATC Funding Plan

Two shows just opened in the old Los Angeles Theatre Center building, and a number of other productions have made plans to use the municipal theater complex during the coming year. But will the city have enough money to keep the doors open?

The city’s Cultural Affairs Department has proposed using $750,000 in city funds to manage the building next year. According to the plan, Cultural Affairs would allocate $400,000 while the remaining $350,000 would come from the Community Redevelopment Agency, the previous LATC company’s primary benefactor. The LATC building remains a central component of redevelopment plans for the Spring Street neighborhood.

But the CRA is prohibited by law from directly funding city operations. The building has been city-owned since last year, so this raises a hurdle.

Here’s how CRA staff thinks the agency might help: The CRA can fund city capital improvements, so by taking over the funding of $350,000 worth of parks and recreation projects in the central city, that would free a like amount of money from the city’s general fund to be diverted into maintenance of the LATC building.

CRA Director of Operations Don Spivack is now trying to identify enough such projects for a presentation to the CRA board on Dec. 17. Assuming the CRA board approves the plan that day, the package--which also would authorize $190,000 in CRA money to buy equipment and other assets from the old LATC company (now in bankruptcy court)--then goes to the City Council.

If the package is stalled, the city could run out of interim funds to keep the building open as soon as March, said Cultural Affairs General Manager Adolfo V. Nodal.

LATINO LAB EXITS LATC: A year ago, after the LATC company folded, members of the company’s Latino Theatre Lab offshoot maintained a vigil inside the building in an effort to stake a continued claim to their space there. They held a splashy fund-raiser in the LATC lobby; listening to the rhetoric at that event, one could easily have believed that the Lab somehow had been officially sanctioned as the building’s new operator.

But it wasn’t, and last week Lab officials were finally moving out of their old quarters.

Lab director Jose Luis Valenzuela said it was just too expensive to keep going in the LATC building. Besides, the Lab is now allied with the Mark Taper Forum, which stepped in to serve as the group’s fiscal receiver after LATC died, enabling the Lab to maintain its nonprofit status.

It may not be a final adios for the Lab and LATC; the Taper/Lab alliance is one member of the cooperative that will have dibs on the LATC stages under the city’s operating plan, if it comes to pass.

Meanwhile, Valenzuela has replaced his friend and colleague Jose Guadalupe Saucedo as the sole Latino among the Taper’s artistic associates. Saucedo, who was among those helping the Lab move out of LATC last week, said he prefers directing plays to the consulting and developmental work he did at the Taper. Valenzuela is “better equipped to work in large institutions than I am,” he added, noting that “it’s not easy to open doors (at the Taper) during budget cutbacks.”

HARMONY GORED: A City Council committee recently closed a door on the Harmony Gold company’s plan to turn its auditorium in West Hollywood into a mid-sized theater. The Planning and Land Use Management committee rejected the firm’s appeal of a zoning decision that prohibited the company from using the auditorium for both stagings and screenings.

The company had contended that the ability to hold screenings as well as theatrical productions was essential in order to justify the conversion of the auditorium into a real theater. But some of the neighbors had protested that the expanded use of the facility would create traffic and parking problems.

SCROOGE CAN RELAX: Long Beach Civic Light Opera subscribers already know this, but any non-subscribers who were hoping to see the LBCLO’s second annual production of “A Musical Christmas Carol” will have to seek Christmas cheer elsewhere. The $275,000 production was canceled because of cash-flow problems, said executive producer Pegge Logefeil, and $60,000 has been refunded to subscribers.