Mayor’s Panel Poses Options for LATC : Theater: The study group outlines three plans, including one to convert the facility into a city-owned complex with different production companies. In the meantime, the CRA urges additional funds for this season.

The staff of the city Community Redevelopment Agency has recommended an additional $998,390 subsidy to the Los Angeles Theatre Center--while a commission studying the facility has produced three draft recommendations, including a plan to convert it into a city-owned stage complex with the existing LATC company just one of several producers.

The CRA will deliver a staff report to its board today calling for the additional grant, which would continue city payments to defer debt service and building maintenance costs, without which LATC managers have said they might not be able to complete the 1991 season.

The draft recommendation to restructure the LATC, from the Mayor’s LATC Study Group, is one of three options presented in a closely held report placed in limited circulation late last week. The document also proposed two other draft options: outright closure of the four-stage LATC pending extensive re-evaluation of how to make use of it, and, at the opposite extreme, preservation of the status quo.

The new grant, which would require City Council approval, is in addition to $750,000 in subsidy money approved in July. The nearly $1.75 million in the two grants would bring total city financial commitments to the LATC to $20.4 million since the redevelopment agency proposed luring a theater complex to Spring Street in 1978 and 1979 as a means of revitalizing the historic core of downtown Los Angeles.

The report now under review is the first of three drafts expected to emerge from the study group. A second and more detailed draft is expected to be finished early next week, with the final version scheduled for completion as early as Sept. 20.

Sources familiar with the study group emphasized that the three options in the initial draft report do not necessarily indicate the precise recommendations the study group may make. These sources, speaking on the condition of anonymity, characterized the options as among a larger and more varied number of possible solutions the study group has discussed.

Details of the draft report were obtained by The Times and confirmed independently by three sources familiar with the document. The study group was appointed earlier this year by Mayor Tom Bradley. It is headed by William Wingate, a New York City consultant who previously served as executive managing director of the Center Theatre Group.

Ongoing financial difficulties at the LATC stem from overly optimistic projections of the theater center’s ability to sustain itself financially and to absorb costs of buying the converted former bank building that serves as its lobby, building the connected four-theater structure itself and defraying ongoing capital expenses.

The theater center has never been able to break even and initial projections of the quick end to city subsidies have given way to ongoing needs for continued support. Earlier this year, the LATC submitted a proposed five-year plan calling for infusion of $32 million more in redevelopment agency or other city money--including complete forgiveness of outstanding capital loans and interest and establishment of a $15-million endowment.

The three possible LATC alternatives are presented in an initial draft of the study group report, which was was placed in limited circulation among study group members and a few other theater officials and civic leaders late last week.

City Councilman Mike Woo, a supporter of the LATC, said the financial problems the city and the theater center have been struggling to change may mean that the option of retaining the status quo is simply not possible. “The status quo would mean that the city would have to make a substantial ongoing financial commitment to keeping the current structure in place,” said Woo. “I don’t know that we can afford to do that and I don’t know that there is the political will in council to do that.”

Woo said a combination of the status quo and conversion to a multi-producer complex may emerge as the solution. Other local theater experts suggested that, under such an arrangement, the existing LATC organization might emerge as a first-among-equals, responsible for the bulk of the complex’s programming, but with outside producers of original productions or presenters of touring plays filling in the schedule for perhaps a third of the year.

Reorganizing the LATC as a multi-tenant center would adapt, with certain modifications, the basic design of the county-owned Music Center complex. There, six tenant organizations--technically called “resident companies”--share space and facilities and are responsible for their own operating costs, with maintenance and capital improvement expenses paid for by Los Angeles County. The tenants range from the Los Angeles Philharmonic to the Center Theatre Group.

The county, in turn, recoups some of its expenses from parking revenues. The county cannot hope to earn a profit on the Music Center, but most experts agree the value of a government-owned downtown cultural center in Los Angeles justifies the financial downside.

Under this system, said a Music Center spokeswoman, the county pays for everything from routine janitorial services to replacement of worn carpeting in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion lobby and worn-out ventilation machinery. The arrangement recognizes a reality widely perceived in the creative community--that both mainstream-establishment and experimental-innovative theater and music have extreme difficulty in sustaining themselves in terms of production and operating costs, as well as providing for real estate-related costs like debt-service and repairs.

The Music Center operating design is widely perceived as one of the better models across the country--superior, for instance, to Lincoln Center in New York and the Kennedy Center in Washington, which is currently mired in a financial crisis of its own largely caused by a crisis in building maintenance and other capital costs.

Establishing the LATC as a city-owned facility where stage producers would not be financially responsible for building upkeep has long been the preferred option to the management of the existing LATC, led by artistic director Bill Bushnell, producing director Diane White and managing director Robert Lear. The LATC, however, has not advocated conversion of the center to a multi-company facility.

At the redevelopment agency, commissioners are scheduled to review a report today from John J. Tuite, the agency’s administrator, that concludes the new infusion of city money is essential to permit orderly review and implementation of recommendations by the Wingate commission. For the study group’s report to be properly reviewed and decisions based on it to be reached, Tuite concluded, the LATC must receive subsidy money to carry it through June, 1991.

“Because it is anticipated the study groups findings will require extensive review and consideration,” Tuite wrote in the report to be received by the redevelopment agency board today, “the recommended funding is necessary in order to enable the LATC to complete the fall-winter season.”