Performing Arts Center Tries Plan B

Nine months into a campaign to raise $200 million for two new concert halls, the Orange County Performing Arts Center has yet to land the huge “naming gift” its officials had hoped would be the cornerstone of their fund-raising drive, prompting a change in tactics.

Instead of waiting for a single $50-million gift to lead the campaign, the center will try to raise the money by summer’s end from among its own board members and those of the five regional performing arts groups that are the center’s leading tenants, said Chairman Roger T. Kirwan.

Broadcom Corp.’s multibillionaire chief executive, Henry T. Nicholas III, was courted, but he said Tuesday that he is not interested in a naming donation.

“I’ve given millions and millions to them,” said Nicholas, who like his partner, Henry Samueli, serves on the center’s 48-member board of directors. “I don’t care about getting my name on a building. All I care about is Broadcom, Broadcom’s stock and Broadcom’s shareholders.”

Center officials say the expansion is needed because Segerstrom Hall, which opened in 1986, is fully booked and can’t accommodate all the dance, music, opera, Broadway touring shows and pop and jazz concerts that county arts enthusiasts would like to see. They have proposed a 2,000-seat concert hall and 500-seat multipurpose theater to open in 2004 across the street from the existing 3,000-seat facility in Costa Mesa.

“We had great expectations of a certain donor; they have not yet chosen to do it,” Kirwan said, declining to specify whether the prospect was Nicholas.

“I can’t guess the reasons why a given donor chooses not to do it,” Kirwan said. “It has to be understood that no matter how much money someone has, these are huge amounts of money. To ask somebody to part with that . . . is very serious business.”

In all, Kirwan said, center officials have made naming-grant requests of four or five potential megadonors. “I believe there are at least 25 people in the county who can do that,” he said. “Which is not bad if you only need one or two.”

But when the stock market plummeted Friday, the idea of trying to raise $200 million suddenly became “a terrifying thought,” Kirwan said.

With the roller coaster climbing again this week, Kirwan said he is thinking more calmly about the task ahead. He assumes that donors capable of giving millions will have diversified portfolios that preserve huge sums even when the markets dip.

Kirwan was speaking by phone Tuesday from Boston, where he had just met with officials of the Boston Symphony while on an unrelated business trip. He said he was encouraged to find that the Boston Symphony is approaching a fund-raising target of $138 million with no gift larger than $10 million.

But Peter Hero, executive director of the Community Foundation of Silicon Valley, a $500-million charity, said he believes “if they don’t have some gifts in the range of 25- to 50 million, they won’t raise the 200 million. I think it’s certainly doable. . . . It can take a year; it can take longer.”

“It’s a precedent-setting gift, so it’s not surprising to me it may be taking a little longer,” said Bonnie Brittain Hall, executive director of Arts Orange County. an arts advocacy council. “Certainly a $50-million gift is substantially different from what we’ve seen before in Orange County in the arts.”

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Center officials announced last July that they had embarked upon what they term the “quiet phase” of fund-raising--the private solicitation of large, cornerstone donations prior to a public fund-raising drive.

But Kirwan and Mark Chapin Johnson, the former center chairman who is a point man in the capital campaign, say the process was held back by unexpectedly protracted negotiations to deed over the six-acre parking lot that the Segerstrom family has donated for the center expansion. The transfer did not take place until December, and Johnson said it was difficult to expect donors to contribute huge sums to a construction project that technically did not have any property to build on.

“It would be nice if major naming gifts came earlier in the process rather than later,” Johnson said. “It’s not a question of whether they will, just a question of when.”

Last December Broadcom’s Samueli gave a total of $50 million to the engineering schools at UCLA and UC Irvine. Funding for the Walt Disney Concert Hall under construction in Los Angeles began with a naming grant of $50 million in 1987 from Disney’s widow, Lillian B. Disney. The Walt Disney Co. later contributed $25 million toward the project, which has an estimated cost of $274 million.

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The Performing Arts Center’s courting of large-scale donors will continue even as the campaign turns toward arts board members, who will be asked for gifts in the millions but not the tens of millions.

“We have to move forward,” Kirwan said, “and the best way is to get a strong expression of faith and belief from our board and our arts partners’ [boards].”

The Pacific Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, Opera Pacific, the William Hall Master Chorale and the Pacific Chorale are joining the center in seeking large construction gifts from their board members.

Johnson said three naming opportunities are on the table: $50 million for the concert hall, $25 million for the multipurpose theater and $20 million for the park-like plaza project architect Cesar Pelli is designing to connect the current performing arts center with the new wing.

If the center is to attract such donations, Johnson said, “we recognize our board needs to set the example and lead the charge. If you lead by example, people will follow you.”

But what if the center and its arts allies find themselves charging into the teeth of a bear market and a recession?

Like other arts leaders whose organizations use the center and rely on donors to fund large chunks of their budgets, Opera Pacific’s executive director, Martin Hubbard, has watched recent market dips warily.

“At the moment I wouldn’t be too concerned, but if the correction continues . . . that’s another matter entirely,” he said. “From all the donors I know and talk to, it’s a topic of conversation on everybody’s lips. There has to be some ripple effect, but I don’t see it as a major calamity right now.

The soaring markets had not been a bonanza for Opera Pacific in any case, Hubbard said.

“I don’t know that it’s directly translated into us receiving more money. We haven’t upped our donations substantially beyond normal growth. I couldn’t categorize any of it as being a stock-market windfall.”

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Dean Corey, the Philharmonic Society’s executive director, thinks that it actually could be a boon to performing arts organizations if wealthy investors conclude that the market has topped out. Those interested in making large gifts of stock would want to donate at a peak value to maximize both the gift and its attendant tax advantages, he said.

Corey doesn’t think this year’s explosion in technology stocks was of great significance to nonprofits anyway. “The more speculative types aren’t the more giving types to begin with. [Core arts donors] are long-haul investors” whose portfolios, he believes, will not wither if the tech sector, which has taken the brunt of recent declines, continues to fall.

John E. Forsyte, executive director of the Pacific Symphony, says that annual gifts to the organization have grown more than 50% over the past two years, with $3.1 million expected to be donated this year. “The accumulation of wealth over the past five years has been so extraordinary that the correction we’ve had doesn’t seem to be slowing the juggernaut,” he said.

But in one unforeseen consequence of great wealth, Forsyte says it is harder to buttonhole prospective major donors.

People with huge portfolios tend to travel more and be caught up in spending what they’ve gained, he says. “People need to be here, and our major donors need the opportunity to explore the wealth and riches of the institutions they have locally. That can be hard to do if everybody’s traveling,” he said. “When I look at our house and I see a lot of no-shows on the main floor where the expensive seats are and the balcony is packed, I wonder if there isn’t some correlation.”

Opera Pacific’s Hubbard thinks the center still has a realistic shot at attracting the naming gifts its plan requires. “There are certainly half a dozen [local donors] that could do that easily, and probably more than that.”

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Times staff writer P.J. Huffstutter contributed to this report.