Feasibility Study for Arts Center OKd

Thousand Oaks has its Civic Arts Plaza. Ojai has Libbey Bowl. Oxnard has a Civic Auditorium.

Ventura, however, has no community center dedicated to the performing arts, and city leaders are moving ahead with long-awaited plans to create one.

The Ventura City Council agreed Monday night to pursue a Downtown Cultural District Plan that will include recommendations for establishing and funding a performing arts center.

The plan, which is essentially a study of the feasibility of such a center, is one of the last major hurdles in a four-year quest to enhance the city’s artistic community.

“This is the last and the biggest piece,” said Sonia Tower, supervisor of the city’s cultural affairs office. “We know that we have to deal with this issue at some point.”

The council’s action specifically allows city staff to solicit proposals from consultants interested in writing a Downtown Cultural District Plan, a lengthy report that will outline potential locations for a performing arts center, funding sources and other programs designed to promote the arts.

One critical piece of the plan would focus on sources of financial support. Even though the city does not intend to build a performing arts center, renovating one may not be cheap.

“The key is resource development,” Councilwoman Rosa Lee Measures said before the meeting. “Our vision is large and yet our dollars are limited.”

Two years ago, the city set aside $45,000 to hire a consultant to draft the proposed study, but otherwise no money has been earmarked for opening a performing arts center, and the potential costs are uncertain.

At the council meeting Monday, three residents asked why the city would pay a consultant $45,000 to conduct a study when the report could be written by city staff.

But city officials explained that just two people make up the cultural affairs staff and that launching such a study would take too much time away from their other responsibilities.

“It is not a matter of expertise, it is a matter of staff time,” said Everett Millais, community services director. The council is expected to select a consultant in January.

Since building such a center is expected to cost millions of dollars the city does not have, the city’s arts and cultural affairs committee has recommended renovating a building in downtown Ventura.

“We are not talking about building something from scratch,” Tower said. “We are talking about an existing structure that can be renovated.”

The Mayfair Theater, the Knights of Columbus Hall and the vacant third floor of City Hall--once the location of the county’s women’s jail--are sites the committee has recommended for study.

Ventura resident Miriam Mack suggested during the meeting that the study also consider the historic Peirano’s market on Main Street as another possible site.

Renovating old buildings into new arts centers is not an unprecedented concept in Ventura County. Just this month, the city of Simi Valley celebrated the opening of its new Cultural Arts Center, a $3.6-million community theater housed in a former Episcopal church.

About four years ago, Ventura launched a grass-roots effort to adopt a cultural plan that involved more than 200 participants from the arts and business communities.

Since then, about 85% of the goals identified by the community have been accomplished, such as forming an office and commission for cultural affairs.

In related business Monday night, the council agreed to create a seven-member public art advisory committee that will work with the cultural affairs group.

Establishing a performing arts center is the last unmet goal identified by the community, and the most complicated and costly one.

The issue has not been tackled because the city needed a cultural affairs office in place before grants and other sources of funding could be pursued, officials said.

The city is now able to move forward with plans for a theater facility and other arts programs, such as creating an artists’ corridor downtown, where local sculptors, painters and actors could establish studios where they could live and work.

“I believe that we have a strong potential of evolving into a cultural community of a very high quality,” Measures said. “It will only get better.”