Pay Puts Chief of OCPAC on Top of the Heap

The top executive of the Orange County Performing Arts Center customarily has been the highest-paid arts administrator in the county and one of the highest-paid in the nation.

In all likelihood, that will remain true when the center names a new chief (an announcement is expected soon). It especially should be the case if the job goes to one reported finalist: Josiah A. Spaulding Jr., current head of the Wang Center for the Performing Arts in Boston.

Spaulding told the Boston Globe in 1995 that he was being paid $275,000 a year. A 1993 survey quoted in the Globe indicated that he was the second-highest-paid chief executive of a cultural institution in Boston at the time.

Spaulding, 45, has headed the Wang since 1987. His father, the former chairman of the Massachusetts Republican Party, ran for the U.S. Senate against Edward M. Kennedy in 1970 and headed the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the state arts agency, from 1991 to 1995.

If Spaulding’s salary at the Wang were matched here, it would mark a return to the high-flying days of the late 1980s when the Orange County center’s management team of Thomas R. Kendrick and Judith O’Dea Morr (Kendrick’s wife) received combined annual compensation and benefits of more than $300,000.

In 1988, as center president, Kendrick was paid $184,246 in salary and had a benefits package of $6,543 for a total of $190,789, according to documents filed with the California Registry of Charitable Trusts. As general manager that year, Morr was paid $108,678 and had a benefits package worth $3,749 for a total of $112,427.

Tom Tomlinson, who resigned as president of the center in July 1996, was paid $183,000 in salary and benefits for 1995, according to financial documents. His compensation was less than Kendrick’s but still good compared with that of Esther Wachtell, whose came to $200,000 a year in the early 1990s when she headed the much larger and more significant Los Angeles Music Center.

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Compensation for executives at tax-exempt, nonprofit arts institutions tends to be considerably lower than that of corporate executives in the private sector. As of 1995, however, the center had five executives whose total compensation came to more than $100,000 and 15 other staffers receiving more than $50,000 a year.

Officials at all the leading arts organizations in Orange County are fairly well paid. South Coast Repertory’s top management is paid slightly more than that of the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, a somewhat larger operation. SCR artistic director Martin Benson’s salary came to $94,000, and producing artistic director David Emmes’ came to $91,000 in fiscal 1995; Old Globe artistic director Jack O’Brien’s salary was $86,976, and managing director Thomas Hall’s was $85,098 that year, according to financial documents filed by the theaters with the IRS.

Louis G. Spisto, the executive director of the Pacific Symphony in Santa Ana--and reportedly another candidate to head the center--was paid $117,500 in 1995 (see chart). Carl St.Clair, the Pacific Symphony’s music director, took in a salary of $130,000 in 1994 and an allowance of $15,100 for expenses. Michael Botwinick, who left in February as director of the Newport Harbor Art Museum, received total compensation of $132,000 in 1994.

Other top-paid arts executives have included David DiChiera who, working part time as general director of Opera Pacific, was paid $110,250 in 1995; Peter C. Keller, executive director of the Bowers Museum, $102,405 in 1995; and Dean Corey, executive director of the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, $99,600 in 1995.