CRA Board Recommends $750,000 Outlay for LATC

Los Angeles Theatre Center, threatened with the end of facilities support from the Community Redevelopment Agency, received the CRA board’s approval Thursday of another $750,000.

If ratified as part of the CRA budget by the Los Angeles City Council, the amount will keep the LATC doors open through its current spring-summer season and through part of the fall-winter season.

But an aide to Councilwoman Gloria Molina, who heads the council committee that will consider the request later this month, said, “I think the council is going to want to know the (theater’s) plan for the future before they approve this $750,000.”

The theater submitted a five-year plan to the CRA in April, requesting facilities support and debt service amounting to $32 million. A CRA spokesman said that request would be transmitted to the council, but in the meantime Mayor Tom Bradley appointed an independent study group to examine the LATC plan. That group has been given 90 days to come up with its own long-range plan to insure the survival of theater in the LATC facility.

The city council might go ahead and approve the $750,000 request for interim funding if its members feel “confident enough that the study group will come out with a plan they can live with,” said Molina aide Gerry Hertzberg.

Meanwhile, a June 15 debt payment of $298,000 “will be made,” said LATC chairman E. Kent Damon Jr., even though it’s an amount larger than the balance in a CRA reserve fund set up for that purpose. He declined to say how, though he acknowledged that the $750,000 that’s now awaiting council approval will not be available until July at the earliest and therefore could not be used to make the payment.

Speaking to the CRA board Thursday, Damon noted that LATC income has risen by more than 70% over the last three years, while expenses have increased by only 2%.

He was responding to CRA commissioner Larry Kirk’s observation of “a perception in the community” that the theater and CRA have not responded quickly enough to the theater’s financial difficulties.