Dueling Arts Centers : Neighboring Antelope Valley cities of Lancaster and Palmdale refuse to share an arts center. Each is planning to build a theater of about 700 seats, and the two venues may end up competing for audiences as well as performers.

Lancaster and Palmdale, the small but booming cities of the Antelope Valley, share a border. That’s about all they are willing to share.

They fought over the valley’s first mall, they competed for the area’s first auto dealership complex and they both wanted to be the home of a performing arts center.

Of those issues, the one that seemingly most cried out for cooperation was the arts center. After all, civic arts centers--where theater, music and dance can be properly presented--are generally not revenue producers. They cost millions of dollars to build and additional hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to operate. That’s a significant expense for a city the size of Lancaster, with a population of 80,000, or Palmdale, with 55,000, even though both are growing fast.

The obvious solution would be that Lancaster and Palmdale build a single performing arts center to serve both.

You might as well suggest that the Israelis and Palestinians come together to build an amusement park.

“We have met with Palmdale and made proposals about many things that we could have done together,” Lancaster Councilman Arnie Rodio said. “And every time, they have backed out on us.”

“We went to the city of Lancaster and suggested that we go in together to jointly do a theater,” countered Anita Baeke, one of the leaders of the Palmdale arts center effort. “They just did not seem overly interested.”

Each city is going ahead with its own arts center plans--Lancaster’s is already under construction and Palmdale has recently acquired the land for its center. If all goes as planned, the Antelope Valley will have two performing arts centers almost identical in size and only 10 miles apart.

Few city officials in Lancaster and Palmdale question the need for good performance spaces.

“We have two groups here, Desert Opera Theatre and Palmdale Repertory Theatre, that perform in the building they call the Palmdale Cultural Center,” Baeke said. “All it is, really, is a banquet hall with a stage at one end.”

In Lancaster, Antelope Valley Community College has only a 300-seat theater and its orchestra performs in the gymnasium. The city’s Cedar Street Theatre troupe uses a former USO hall.

Even the public schools in the Antelope Valley do not have auditoriums. Their music and theater groups perform in gyms and cafeterias.

Both cities began planning their arts centers in the early 1980s. Baeke, then director of the Desert Opera company, was hired by Palmdale in 1984 to oversee a feasibility study and organize a fund-raising drive.

“We did a study that showed we could keep an arts center busy on weekends 52 weeks a year,” Baeke said. The primary users would be Desert Opera, Palmdale Repertory, local schools and touring shows.

By 1986, Palmdale officials had formulated a plan that called for renovating an auditorium left standing when Maryott High School was razed. This Maryott Performing and Visual Arts Center was to have a 400-seat theater, an art gallery and meeting rooms. The projected cost for the renovation--$1.675 million.

It was the Maryott plan that Baeke took to Lancaster seeking a joint effort, but Lancaster officials were not inclined to support a theater that was in the heart of Palmdale.

Lancaster, in the meantime, had contracted with a group of theater consultants who came up with a grandiose plan to build an arts complex in a city park. The complex was to include a 2,000-seat and a 450-seat theater, an outdoor amphitheater and several shops. The projected cost--$27 million.

“That, of course, was out of the question,” said Lancaster Mayor Lynn Harrison, who has been on the City Council since 1982.

Lancaster finally settled on a theater with seating for about 725, partially in reaction to plans being drawn up in Palmdale.

“Palmdale had made the decision to remodel the Maryott at about 400 seats,” Harrison said. “By building a bigger theater, it would keep us from duplicating what they were doing. It would give the area two different theaters, for different kinds of events.”

The Lancaster project was also relocated to the city’s downtown commercial strip, which was in decline. The city bought an abandoned movie theater, located between an appliance store and a gift shop, and leveled it to prepare the site.

The project was supported by most city officials, although one councilman fought almost all aspects of it, including its move downtown.

“If they wanted to put something downtown to help out the area, they should have put up a bowling alley or something that would bring in revenue,” Councilman George Theophanis said. “The way it was done, they took a prime piece of property and took it off the tax rolls.”

Theophanis was outvoted, and construction began last May. Final plans call for the center to have a 725-seat theater, with an orchestra pit on a hydraulic lift so that it can be raised to expand the stage. It also includes a community room, bar area and small “black box” theater that can be configured several different ways for performances and classes. The budget, not including the money the city spent to acquire and prepare the land, is $7.5 million, although Theophanis and other members of the council predict final construction costs will be higher.

The city is not footing the entire bill. A group of citizens formed the Lancaster Arts Center Foundation and pledged to raise at least $500,000 toward construction costs.

Lancaster officials are obviously delighted that they have started construction while Palmdale’s arts center is still in the planning stage. This is particularly sweet in light of last year’s bitter fight over which city would get the Antelope Valley’s first shopping mall. Palmdale won that battle and, to make matters worse for Lancaster, its downtown Sears, Roebuck and J.C. Penney stores will be relocating to the mall when it’s completed.

The Palmdale arts center project was set back when it was determined that the Maryott plan would cost much more than originally projected. City officials decided that for the kind of money needed for the renovation, a new facility could be built.

Also contributing to the delay was the disappointing amount of money raised by the Antelope Valley Cultural Foundation for the project. The foundation, created to support the project, made a pact with the city in 1984 to raise $750,000. To date, it has only $450,000 in hand.

What got the Palmdale project back on track was prominent developer Ron Ordin’s gift of a 5.7-acre parcel of undeveloped land in an area he is developing near the Palmdale Boulevard off-ramp of the Antelope Valley Freeway. He also promised to donate an additional $10,000 a year for 10 years to help pay for operation of the center.

Both gifts are contingent on the city building the arts center on that site.

Ordin would only say of the gift, “They needed a home for the theater and we got the land for them.” He has acknowledged in other interviews that an arts center would help attract interest in adjoining lands he owns, on which he once said he wanted to build a movie theater and recreation facility.

In December, the Palmdale City Council accepted the gift of the land. Architects were hired to do working drawings. But Palmdale was no longer considering building a 400-seat theater. Its City Council decided that 700 seats, about the same number as in Lancaster’s arts center, sounded better.

Palmdale Mayor W.J. (Pete) Knight insisted that the size of his city’s project had nothing to do with what was going on 10 miles up the road. “I can’t speak for what they are doing in Lancaster,” Knight said. “We are looking at a theater that will be used by the performing arts groups here, and we have several of them, and it will be used by the city as well for other functions. It seemed the right size to us.”

The Palmdale arts center, which must get council approval at several more stages of its development, now has a budget of about $4.7 million. Knight said he doesn’t know why the Palmdale project is projected to cost about $3 million less than Lancaster’s.

For both cities, the costs will not end on the theaters’ opening nights.

Lyle Norton, Lancaster’s director of parks, recreation and arts, estimates that the annual operating costs of his city’s center--including staff salaries, cleaning and maintenance--will be $400,000 to $500,000 a year. He said he expects the city will have to subsidize at least half that amount with the rest to come from box-office revenue and theater rentals.

“Theaters of this size owned by a city don’t bring in enough revenue to cover costs,” Norton said. “We have to consider this an expense to provide a city service, like we do with parks or swimming pools.”

Money to operate the theater will have to be allocated by the City Council, probably on a yearly basis. But even the center’s staunchest opponent said he will probably vote for the subsidies.

“I probably would not say no,” Theophanis said. “I’m a little hot about the thing, but once it’s up there, what can I do about it?”

If Palmdale’s arts center is built, it will probably cost the city more to operate than Lancaster’s. The Palmdale City Council has approved agreements with Desert Opera and Palmdale Rep that allow these groups to use the theater free for a combined total of 18 weekends a year. That means that for more than one-third of the weekends per year, the arts center will generate no revenue or fees.

This is a great deal for Desert Opera and Palmdale Rep; at most arts centers resident companies pay rent or a fee to use the facility. For example, at the Music Center of Los Angeles, the resident Center Theatre Group pays $395 per performance to use the 737-seat Mark Taper Forum.

Knight predicts that the operating costs of the Palmdale center will be about $400,000 a year, and that the city will pick up about 80% of the tab.

Lancaster’s performing arts center is scheduled to open in February, 1991. Palmdale’s mayor said his city’s arts center will probably not be completed for about two years. If and when both are up and running, the competition between Lancaster and Palmdale will probably increase. Unless some kind of joint operating agreement for the centers is forged--and that is highly unlikely--they will be competing for touring attractions. They could conceivably get into bidding wars.

They will also be competing for audiences and there will inevitably be debates about which city has the nicer arts center.

Although they are fighting over something as refined as the arts, Lancaster and Palmdale are keeping alive the tradition of Wild West border wars.