Council Vote Officially Gives LATC a New Lease on Life : Stage: Officials overwhelmingly approve plan to turn the center into a municipal theater.

It’s official: Los Angeles Theatre Center will become a municipal theater complex, owned by the city of Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles City Council voted 9-2 Tuesday to enact the long-discussed plan into law.

The council had tentatively approved the LATC package in March. Last week, the council endorsed the details as drawn up by the City Administrative Office, 8-3, but the vote on the ordinance itself was postponed by a week.

One of those who voted against the package last week, Marvin Braude, switched sides in Tuesday’s vote, leaving only Zev Yaroslavsky and Ernani Bernardi in opposition to the LATC package. It passed with no additional debate. Two previous supporters of the LATC plan, Joan Milke Flores and Joel Wachs, were absent.

The vote authorizes the Community Redevelopment Agency to exercise a purchase option on the building. The price is $5.25 million, most of it going to the holders of 1982 construction bonds that are now in default.

Title will then be transferred from the CRA to the city, and the city’s Cultural Affairs Department will manage the building, opening up 30% of the available stage time for use by arts groups other than the LATC production company.

The LATC company will remain as the primary tenant, however, leasing the building for 10 years at the cost of $1 per year. In exchange for the low rent, LATC must now pick up the maintenance costs of the building, which the CRA had been providing since the building opened in 1985.

The only future assistance LATC will receive from the city will be a one-time-only $450,000 building maintenance payment, $300,000 to pay for building expenses already incurred earlier this year and whatever programming grants the company wins through the peer panel procedures of the L.A. Arts Endowment. However, the city will contribute $150,000 annually to help support the programs administered by the Cultural Affairs Department within the building.

After the vote, a smiling Bill Bushnell, LATC artistic director, predicted that the city’s Cultural Affairs programming will begin as early as November in the building’s smallest theater, and as early as the end of 1991 in at least one of the larger theaters.