New Year’s Leading Role: Cautious Optimism : A LOOK AHEAD: Despite the county bankruptcy, the arts hope to expand.

Local arts leaders are jittery about Orange County’s fiscal crisis, but the fiasco hasn’t yet forced any organization to take special measures or to alter plans for the year ahead.

Indeed, some arts groups are talking about expanding.

Irvine Fine Arts Center officials are wringing their hands because the center relies on support from the city of Irvine, which had $198.1 million in the county’s now-bankrupt investment pool. “I’m worried about the center, I’m worried about my own job, and I’m worried about the city in general,” says center supervisor Tony Pang. “I can’t help but be.”

But most arts organizations in the county traditionally receive little government support. Some cities and the County Board of Supervisors award a few arts grants, but most are in the four-figure range. If those sources dried up, arts officials say nobody would suffer much.

Still, many believe the county’s money troubles are likely to have some trickle-down effect--if not now, later.

“I imagine it will act upon the local economy the way the recession did,” says Susan M. Anderson, acting director of the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach. “Maybe some of our donors’ (personal finances) will be affected, and that will affect us in turn.”

“We have a danger of people being concerned and pulling back” on their philanthropy, agrees Newport Harbor Art Museum director Michael Botwinick in Newport Beach. “I think (the arts) are going to get hit on.”

School districts could lose millions, and some are considering cuts in their arts programs--a grave concern for arts leaders who see such programs as cultivating future audiences and aspiring performers.

No schools have yet canceled 1995 field trips to Pacific Symphony concerts, says Louis G. Spisto, the orchestra’s executive director. But “the arts, especially in elementary schools, continue to be considered a frill,” he adds, “and I think we run the risk of having those programs cut even further.”

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But, as of the moment, no arts group is publicly discussing any kind of program cuts, no one has been laid off, and no panicky trustees have quit or have called to say forget about their largess in ’95.

(Two Pacific Symphony summer concerts in Anaheim’s Pierson Park have been canceled, but city parks, recreation and community services director Chris Jarvi says that had “nothing to do with the bankruptcy.” The loss of a Leo Freedman Foundation grant, which previously funded the concerts, was the cause, Jarvi said.)

The city of Fullerton had $22.8 million in the investment pool but “can pay its bills for the rest of the fiscal year,” according to Joe Felz, director of the city-run and funded Fullerton Museum Center. “And there haven’t been any trustee resignations.”

At least one institution reports ticket sales that are stronger than predicted: When “The Sound of Music” opened two days after Christmas at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, 78% of the seats had been sold. “We reduce our expectations for anything we do in this (holiday) period,” center president Tom Tomlinson said last week.

Several groups are saying that expansion plans haven’t been tabled. The Newport Harbor Art Museum’s plan to expand into a vacated adjacent public library; conversion of a bank building into a second theater for the Laguna Playhouse in Laguna Beach; and the opening in late March of the Huntington Beach Art Center, a conversion project being co-sponsored by the city, still are on the boards, according to those involved.

“As of today, the problems with the county are not affecting us,” Huntington Beach community services director Ron Hagan said last week. “We’re moving ahead on schedule.

“The only possible scenario that could affect construction,” Hagan added, “would be if new revenues aren’t passed from the county to the city and the city suffers a cash flow problem in paying its contractors. Then the arts center--along with city road, sewer, park and other capital projects--would be negatively affected.”

Expansion of outreach programs is underway at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, which has raised its education budget by 30% to $631,600. The money is earmarked to more than double “From the Center” performances in public schools (to 350, up from 150) and to extend from 10 to 15 days the Imagination Celebration the center sponsors annually with the Orange County Department of Education.

The center will continue to offer six Broadway musicals this year (the number went up from five in 1993) and hopes to increase its total number of performances by about 15%, Tomlinson says. More contemporary “adventuresome dance” also is planned, he adds, thanks to positive response to recent performances by the avant-garde Nederlans Dans Theater.

“The arts in hard times have often flourished” Tomlinson says. “We didn’t see an enormous downturn in the recession and hopefully we’ll continue to see the same kind of response from the community in the next year.”

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One dark cloud many do see on the horizon is the potential impact of the new Republican congressional majority on the National Endowment for the Arts.

The incoming speaker of the House of Representatives, archconservative Newt Gingrich of Georgia, has recommended the eradication of the NEA, the National Endowment for the Humanities--both of which come up for reauthorization this year--and of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He’d rather see them funded by the private sector.

Other Republicans recommend slashing the NEA’s budget in half, rather than abolishing it entirely. But some NEA supporters contend that a cut that big effectively would render the agency powerless.

Still, NEA officials remain optimistic, according to spokesman Josh Dare. “Our position is that we have always enjoyed bipartisan support in the Congress, and we expect that support to continue,” Dare says. “We don’t have friends in high places at this point, but we have friends in both bodies.”

Leaders of local arts groups, which annually receive thousands of dollars in NEA grants, are less confident.

“I believe there’s going to be a big re-evaluation of governmental involvement in arts and cultural programs and many of the new majority leaders have been very candid and clear about this,” says Newport Harbor’s Botwinick.

“And I don’t see the minority or the President drawing a line in the sand over these issues. I don’t think Clinton is going to fight Gingrich or Bob Dole (incoming Senate majority leader) to the death over a 50% cut in the NEA.”

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