Concerns Raised Over Wachtell’s Future Role : Reaction: One board member calls her an ‘outstanding fund-raising’ person. But representatives of Disney and Chandler families raise concerns about her continued involvement.

Many patrons of the Los Angeles Music Center had hoped that the announcement of President Esther Wachtell’s resignation in December would ease internal turmoil, improve fund raising and signal a time of healing. But her presence has remained controversial.

Some of her supporters mounted a short-lived petition drive to keep her as president and chief fund-raiser of the Music Center. And others came to her defense.

Maurice J. DeWald, a member of the Music Center Board of Governors, calls Wachtell “the most outstanding fund-raising and development person in the country. . . . She has made many, many friends for the Music Center.”

But representatives of two prominent Southern California families voiced concerns about Wachtell, who steps down July 15. The announcement of Wachtell’s resignation said she will remain on the board and continue to serve on the Walt Disney Concert Hall Committee and the Dorothy B. Chandler Awards Committee.

Disney attorney Ron Gother said he and the late Walt Disney’s daughter, Diane Disney Miller, were concerned that Wachtell’s presence at the Music Center could hamper fund raising for Disney Hall. The Disney family has contributed $93 million toward the project, and the Music Center must raise another $17.5 million.

Gother, a Disney Hall committee member, said the family is continuing to work with Wachtell. But, he said, “she’s been a lightning rod, as I understand it, for people who love her and people who hate her. How effective can she be if there are some people who dislike her intensely?”

In a letter to center board Chairman James A. Thomas, former Los Angeles Times Publisher Otis Chandler said he and his sister, Camilla Frost, “strenuously object” to Wachtell having any role in the awards created with a $1.5-million family grant in honor of their mother, Music Center founder Dorothy B. Chandler. At the request of the Chandler family members, this year’s awards--which give $25,000 grants to emerging artists--will be postponed because the center is undergoing a change of leadership.

“It’s been a sad chapter to me in the history of the Music Center to watch this unfold,” Otis Chandler said in an interview. “It is really what her administration has done to the reputation of the Music Center in the minds of many people who were formerly complete supporters.” Chandler is a member of the Board of Directors of Times Mirror Co.

Wachtell said: “I don’t know how he really would know (about Music Center administration), because he hasn’t really been involved. I look at the accomplishments during that period and wonder if that is a valid statement.”

She said that last year the Music Center achieved its fund-raising goal of $15.5 million, revised downward from an announced goal of $18.3 million.

Wachtell blamed the recession for difficulties at the Music Center, the fund-raising arm for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Mark Taper Forum, Center Theatre Group, the Los Angeles Master Chorale and the Los Angeles Music Center Opera.

Last month, Thomas estimated that the center was about $1.5 million short of its 1992-93 fund-raising goal of $14.5 million. The deadline is June 30.

Wachtell said next year’s goal probably will be lower than this year’s, “but not because there’s anything wrong with the Music Center. It’s because of things that are wrong with our economy.”

She said she is leaving because of a Times report in October that quoted former Music Center Vice President James B. Black as saying Wachtell ordered him to change the center’s accounting system to make it appear that they had met the 1990-91 fund-raising goal. Wachtell has denied the allegation.

“I said to myself: ‘I cannot stand this . . . another minute,’ ” Wachtell said. She said she told the board’s executive committee that “I could not go on under this cloud and I did not think I could be successful under the cloud.”