OCPAC Ready to Think About Expansion Again : Growth: Officials don’t have a date for opening additional theaters but want to be prepared ‘when the time is right.’

The Orange Performing Arts Center probably won’t sprout an additional theater this century, but talk about growth, long stalled because of the recession, has resumed.

“It’s impossible to put a date on” the opening of a new facility, center president Tom Tomlinson said Wednesday, and “even if construction could begin before the end of the century . . . these things don’t go up over night.”

But, Tomlinson said, “we want to make sure we’re ready and posed to be there when the time is right.” The center’s 10th anniversary, in 1996, “is the ideal time for us to set our sights on expansion,” he said. “We’ll see a great deal of activity in the coming year with trying to be ready for that.”

Tomlinson addressed the issue at Tuesday’s annual board meeting and elaborated in an interview Wednesday. He stressed the need to expand the center, which had been envisioned from the beginning as a multi-theater facility.

“We still have a long way to go,” Tomlinson said, “to meet our dream--the dream of living in a community in which every man, woman and child has the opportunity to understand, appreciate and enjoy the performing arts as part of their daily lives.”

Also announced at the meeting was news that the center ended its ninth consecutive year in the black with a $39,000 operating surplus. That was the center’s smallest surplus ever, but the decision had been made to place more surplus funds in the endowment--it now stands at $8.2 million--and less in the operating budget.

“We can’t and aren’t in a position to take on the financial responsibility for additional facilities and programs without a strong endowment,” he said. “Building that endowment is critical to any action to move forward with (new) facilities. . . . We’re caught between a rock and a hard place. We must get the endowment numbers up if we are to move ahead.”

The increased emphasis on building the endowment, Tomlinson said, is due in part to the need to expand programming and facilities. “With the (anticipated) expansion in the number of performances we are planning this year, virtually every playing date is taken.”

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One result is that the center’s annual jazz series “must be altered or eliminated” this year, because open dates don’t coincide with artists’ availability. (Tomlinson said that a summer jazz festival is under consideration for a block of consecutive dates open then. But, he said, “we don’t have (open) the single dates throughout the year that coincide with available dates of the artists we want.”)

Regional groups that regularly use the center--Pacific Symphony, the Orange County Philharmonic Society, Opera Pacific, Master Chorale of Orange County and Pacific Chorale--”cannot grow to their full potential” without additional dates for presentations, Tomlinson added.

Center plans have long called for a symphony hall smaller than the 3,000-seat Segerstrom Hall, plus a small theater.

In a videotape shown at Tuesday’s meeting, founding board chairman and chief executive officer Henry T. Segerstrom called for a “new commitment from all of us to complete the facilities that we originally planned.”

No figure has been set for the endowment before construction may begin, although the stated goal has been to boost the fund to $15 million by the end of 1996.

In the meantime, center officials plan to update marketing and other studies undertaken in the late 1980s. They also expect to institute monthly meetings of a task force designed to elicit input from trustees and other local arts leaders to chart the “overall direction of the center in the next few years,” Tomlinson said.

“The demand exists for more performances of all types,” Tomlinson said. The center’s “quest to reach the entire community,” he said, provides “many opportunities for new types of programming, much of which is not suitable for a theater of this size.

As to what kind of programs he has in mind, Tomlinson said “the palette is rather open.” Smaller dance troupes, children’s theater companies and chamber music groups are under consideration, he said, as are more avant-garde offerings like Nederlands Dans Theatre, whose recent engagement was critically acclaimed but a box-office disappointment.

“I can see us continuing to support that level of work,” he said, adding that “an education process” is necessary to “make sure the kinds of programming we present have an audience in the future.”

Tomlinson, former director of the multi-theater Alaska Center for the Performing Arts, added that as the county struggles with bankruptcy, it “isn’t the ideal time to be out in the community attempting to identify funds for new construction.” But, he said, “we’ll see where we are in another year.”

In other center news, trustees on Tuesday elected Thomas H. Nielsen to his third term as center chairman, and they elected seven new members and 13 incumbents to the board, which now has 60 trustees.

The new members are Jan A. Adams, president of Adams Streeter Civil Engineers Inc.; Norman L. Doerges, executive vice president of Disneyland; Clifford S. Heinz, chief executive officer of the Heinz Foundation; Robert L. Nichols, president and chairman of the Nichols Institute; Richard M. Rodnick, chairman of R.M. Rodnick and Associates; Kenneth T. Stevens, president of Taco Bell; Thomas C. Sutton, chief executive officer of Pacific Mutual, and Judith L. Sweeney, president of The Times Orange County Edition.