GLENDALE : City Agrees to Lend Alex Theatre $80,000

The Glendale Redevelopment Agency agreed Tuesday to lend the Alex Theatre $80,000 to help pay its bills through the rest of the fiscal year, but city officials said they are eager to find a permanent way to support the theater, which is expected to need a subsidy of about $250,000 a year.

City Council members, acting in their capacity as the redevelopment agency’s board of directors, approved the five-year, interest-free loan, which will cover the theater’s operating deficit through June 30.

And despite the theater’s rocky history, council members said they believe the city’s venture into the performing arts will succeed and that they are confident a long-term subsidy will pay off.

“When the Alex project was conceived . . . it was anticipated that somebody, somewhere in government would have to step up with a subsidy,” said Councilman Sheldon Baker, chairman of the redevelopment agency.

Baker said some backers of the theater were lulled into believing it would not need to be subsidized because of the high-profile musical plays that were originally scheduled at the theater. Those plans fell through when a company hired to run the Alex balked midway though the first year of a five-year contract last summer. The theater has been in financial difficulties since.

“For whatever reason that didn’t work out, and now we’re where we thought we’d be when the Alex was first conceived. We need a subsidy,” Baker said.

City officials said the Alex Regional Theatre Board, the nonprofit agency assigned to oversee the theater’s operations, will need about $250,000 a year to cover all the costs of running the venue. City officials are considering siphoning off part of the roughly $800,000 a year collected by the redevelopment agency in bed tax from the Red Lion Hotel.

The redevelopment agency spent more than $6 million to renovate the Art Deco theater into a performing arts house and reopened it in January, 1994. After the pullout of the initial management firm, the city stepped in with an emergency $600,000 subsidy to help the theater stay open, with a scaled-down schedule of events for the rest of 1994.

City officials said they will decide in upcoming budget deliberations how to fund the Alex in the coming year.