Laguna Ousts Charities From Pageant Booths

In a town that constantly frets about sacrificing charm in the pursuit of tourist dollars, the latest decision by the Festival of Arts board threatens to knock this art colony off its easel.

The venerable Festival of Arts and Pageant of the Masters, a 64-year tradition that this summer drew 200,000 people, has kicked out the food booths historically run by six churches and nonprofit community groups.

Instead, the board has decided to turn over food sales to the Ruby’s restaurant chain.

“We have found that it is a necessity for us to not only please our patrons more with what we are offering them . . . but to make a profit from the concession area,” said Philip Freeman, 71, an exhibiting artist and board president. “If you don’t make some changes, you fall behind.”

Freeman said the organizations that ran the booths would be given a block of 150 tickets each to a preview of the pageant next summer. They can sell them to help recoup their lost revenue, he said, adding that such a fund-raiser has worked well for the local Chamber of Commerce.

Nonetheless, the decision--the vote was taken in March but made public only last week--to oust the churches and nonprofit groups has found critics all over this small, sometimes provincial, community.

“It’s so dumb I can’t tell you,” said Terry Neptune, owner of Tivoli Terrace, the sole restaurant on the festival grounds that could now find itself in competition with Ruby’s. “My God, the community booths have been there since the dawn of time.”

The community groups are the Boys and Girls Club, the United Methodist Church, St. Catherine’s of Siena Catholic Church, the Kiwanis Club, the Laguna Playhouse and South Coast Medical Center. Each group paid $1,000 for a spot in the festival food court and divided among their organizations the $50,000 to $60,000 they made a season, according to a city official.

Gail Barus, a spokeswoman for St. Catherine’s, said the money usually went to the church school or the needy parish families. The money will be made up in some way but “this has always been a major fund-raiser for our church,” she said.

Along with the fund-raising issues, some local officials charged that the festival is putting profit over community. The small-town feeling of the festival has always been part of its allure, said Councilman Wayne J. Baglin, a 28-year resident of the city and himself a former food booth volunteer.

“The sad thing is, if you take the volunteers out, you are taking a part of the community from the festival scene and making it more commercial,” Baglin said. “It could look more like a tourist venue that could be anywhere than it does a community activity in Laguna Beach.”

Balancing the needs of tourism and the needs of the community has often been a delicate juggling act in Laguna Beach, a city that lures 3 million visitors annually. The city has done things such as limit the number of T-shirt and trinket shops downtown that, in the view of city planners, do little to serve residents.

Although Laguna Beach has no direct control over the festival, which is a nonprofit organization that exhibits the works of 160 mostly local artists each summer, the grounds on which it is staged are leased from the city. The festival puts on the popular Pageant of the Masters, in which actors motionlessly portray famous works of art, each summer at the Irvine Bowl, which is also leased from the city.

Mayor Wayne L. Peterson, who sits on the festival board as an ex-officio member, said the lease is being renegotiated.

“We are always struggling to balance between the needs of the residents and those of the merchants,” said Peterson, who noted that the city has embarked on a long-range plan to come to terms with these issues. “Of course we need the tourist business to help support the things we do, but we have to find that balance.”

Officials of the Festival of Arts, one of three popular summer art festivals that are responsible for bringing hundreds of thousands of tourists to Laguna Beach, said their decision to remove the community-based food booths was made only after years of reevaluation. The vote was 8 to 1, said Tim Wilcox, the festival’s marketing director.

Part of the board’s decision was based on the fact that the competing Sawdust Festival, located directly across Laguna Canyon Road, offers food made by professional vendors from local restaurants.

This summer’s festival brought in a record $3.6 million in ticket sale revenue. (The festival gives $100,000 each year in scholarships and the rest of the proceeds is reinvested in the grounds or pageant.) But festival organizers saw room for improvement in the food offerings, Wilcox said. Ruby’s was selected over five restaurants that competed for the five-year contract.

Instead of the hot dogs, corn dogs, popcorn and baked potatoes sold by the community groups, Ruby’s will offer a diverse menu much like the foods sold at its 28 diner-style Southern California restaurants, Freeman said.

Ruby’s also will invest about $60,000 in building a kitchen for the food court, something the community groups undoubtedly could not have done, Freeman said.

“We certainly appreciate the work the nonprofits have done for us, but quite frankly they are not meeting the needs of our patrons,” Wilcox said.

Doug Cavanaugh, the president and chief executive officer of Newport Beach-based Ruby’s Restaurant Group, said his company entered the competition only after he learned the festival had made the decision to remove the community groups anyway.

“If we were the ones responsible for their moving, I wouldn’t have done this,” Cavanaugh said. “We will be happy to meet with [the groups] to help them in any way we can.”

But many people in Laguna Beach will undoubtedly be slow to accept the changes. John Kreber, 25, who grew up in Laguna Beach and was a volunteer at the booth run by the St. Catherine’s of Siena Catholic Church, was adamant against the move.

“It’s so weak,” Kreber said. “What’s the deal? The art festival was supposed to support the community, not Ruby’s. It’s not necessarily going to hurt the church . . . but it was something to do to help out. It was a fun, social thing to work there in the summer.”