Major Donor Cancels $50,000 Pledge : Critics Unhappy With Centennial Progress

Barely six weeks after its official kickoff, the golden luster of this city’s planned eight-month 100th birthday extravaganza is losing its sheen.

One group of disgruntled restaurant owners, several of whom have withheld sponsorship payments worth thousands of dollars, has hired an outside consultant to help elicit promotional support from centennial organizers that they say was promised but has not been forthcoming.

A disillusioned art patron is warning local arts groups not to count on the level of help they anticipate from centennial officials.

And IDM Corp., managing partner in the World Trade Center and a major sponsor that had pledged $50,000 in cash and services to the city celebration, has pulled out of the project altogether. “It’s just a business decision,” said company spokeswoman Bobbi Coulter, declining to offer a more detailed explanation.

Other sponsors, however, say that IDM’s defection is symptomatic of a growing disaffection among centennial sponsors and event organizers that threatens to erupt into open rebellion.

“We felt that we would get a lot more help,” said Tim McMillan, general manager of Arnold’s, the Williamsburg and the Queen restaurants, which together pledged more than $6,000 to centennial coffers. “I think there were a lot of grand ideas, but no follow-through.”

Said Dewey Smith, a centennial board member and manager of community relations for McDonnell Douglas Corp., a major centennial sponsor: “All of us on the board are aware that there are some people who have not been real happy with the way things are going. Perhaps we’re not pulling the entire city into it as we had envisioned.”

Dick Sargent, president and chief executive officer of International City Celebration Inc., the nonprofit corporation charged with putting on the centennial, says he is trying his best to pull the entire city in. “If somebody knows how to do that, I’d like to know how,” Sargent said, adding that he is performing exactly as mandated by the city.

The former vice president of operations for the 1984 Olympics under Peter Ueberroth, Sargent was hired more than a year ago by the board of the city-sanctioned corporation to expand the centennial celebration from a modest 10-day affair to a major marketing extravaganza designed to enhance the city’s existing businesses and attract new ones.

In 12 months he was able to increase the centennial budget from $15,000 in the bank to about $1.8 million in cash and in contributed goods and services, Sargent said. Those include complimentary airline seats, advertising commitments, hotel rooms, printing and design services and office supplies. About $200,000 came directly from the city, Sargent said, with the rest--$600,000 in cash and $1 million in goods and services--donated or pledged by the event’s 130 corporate sponsors.

What isn’t clear to some sponsors and event organizers is exactly how those resources are being allocated.

For instance, Lindsay Shields, executive director of the Public Corp. for the Arts, wanted to put on a centennial festival that would be remembered for years to come. So, encouraged by Sargent’s promise to help her attract 50,000 spectators, Shields said, she developed a plan for a 10-day summer arts festival that would transform the downtown promenade into a Tivoli Gardens-style fantasy land, the likes of which had never been seen on the West Coast.

The only problem was the estimated $460,000 price tag. After the centennial committee kicked in $5,000 in cash and services for development of the initial plan, Shields said, Sargent presented her with a list of potential corporate investors. Their unanimous response was that they had no money to contribute because they’d already donated it to International City Celebration Inc. So instead of an extravaganza, she says, the city may have to settle for a more modest July festival featuring local volunteer talent performing under Christmas tree lights instead of elaborate sculptures and processionals under huge festooned banners.

“It was simply beyond our capability,” Sargent said. “We don’t have the money.”

While only 28% of the centennial’s overall income goes for administrative costs, he said, the bulk of the cash on hand goes to pay those expenses. The remaining support, Sargent said, is mostly in the form of in-kind goods and services committed to promoting centennial events.

But event organizers have not always been pleased with the form those promotions have taken. Carla Gordon, acting general manager of the Long Beach Ballet, for instance, tells of the centennial’s promotion of the ballet company’s recent production of “An Ode to Elvis,” which was dubbed the centennial’s first official arts event.

Asked by centennial officials what was needed in terms of promotion, Gordon said, she requested several ads in the Los Angeles Times, which draws 70% of the audience, according to past ballet surveys. Instead, according to Gordon, the event was advertising only in the Long Beach Press-Telegram, an outlet the ballet company had already used.

When the performances ultimately took place, she said, the production attracted an audience that filled only half of the 3,000 seats in the Terrace Theater. And half of those customers had received complimentary tickets.

“We are not at all happy,” Gordon said. “We were told that the purpose of the centennial committee was to promote centennial events. I feel that some promises were made that haven’t been kept.”

Sargent says he chose the 131,000-circulation Press-Telegram over the 1,128,000-circulation Times because the former is a locally based paper and because of the availability of complimentary advertising space.

But the larger issue, Sargent said, goes to the heart of how the centennial is being promoted--by matching centennial events, most of which were already planned, with centennial sponsors capable of promoting them through donated goods and services. “We will help promote them in a general fashion,” he said, “but we have no dollars to put into them. What has happened is that people have heard that there is a big pot of money and they want a piece of it.”

The problem has been exacerbated, he said, by the fact that the initial eight to 10 centennial events that his organization agreed to promote have since grown to more than 30.

“Just because they are on the calendar as a centennial event doesn’t mean that we owe them money,” Sargent said. “Basically we are following the direction that was given to us by our board and approved by the city.”

Yet the perception of unmet expectations has been expressed in a number of ways. Gordon says she now routinely warns local arts groups against taking for granted centennial promises of promotional support. And after several meetings with Sargent involving about 20 restaurateurs, nine of them are now represented by a consultant, John Craig, at a cost of $300 per month.

“The centennial wants to provide services to the restaurants but it needs the restaurants’ input,” said Craig, co-owner of the South Coast Marketing Group and host of a local cable television talk show, “Talk of the Town.” “What our company will be doing is acting as mediator.”

Sargent says the centennial has not been impaired by the withholding of funds by former or disgruntled sponsors. In addition to IDM’s $20,000 in cash and $30,000 in services, he said, about $6,000 in pledged donations from four local restaurants has not been received. While the $20,000 from IDM was never budgeted, he said, the service responsibilities the firm had agreed to undertake have been assumed by another sponsor. And the lost restaurant pledges, he said, are “inconsequential” in his organization’s overall budget.

“It hasn’t generated any hardship,” Sargent said of the losses. “We’re still on schedule; this organization is very liquid.”

Others, meanwhile, are adopting a wait-and-see attitude. “It was a remarkable feat to raise the funds,” said Joseph Prevratil, president of Wrather Port Properties and one of the centennial’s early planners. “Now it’s a question of how everything is going to be implemented.”