O.C. Arts Center Gets Donation of $10 Million

High-tech multi-billionaire Henry Samueli and his wife, Susan, have given $10 million to the Orange County Performing Arts Center’s drive to build two new theaters next to the existing hall in Costa Mesa.

The expansion drive also has been boosted by $5 million from an Orange County donor who wants anonymity, center officials said Thursday. Also announced were smaller gifts from 14 donors totaling $15 million. The gifts bring to $79 million the total raised since the $200 million campaign began in earnest 13 months ago. The goal is to open a new 2,000-seat concert hall and a 500-seat all-purpose theater to augment the existing 3,000-seat Segerstrom Hall, which center officials say is booked to the gills.

The outdoor plaza connecting the existing center to the new wing will be named Samueli Plaza.

Jerry E. Mandel, the center’s president, said that Samueli, a resident of Newport Beach, had promised him the $10 million about two years ago--months before the expansion campaign was announced. The pledge was made official last month, Kirwan said, with the signing of a simple, one-page agreement with no strings attached.

Kirwan said it was the center’s idea, not the Samuelis’, to name the plaza in their honor. Center officials previously had cited $20 million as the target figure for naming rights to the plaza; Kirwan said he felt it was important to put the Samueli name on the plaza to highlight the couple’s emergence as “an epitome of the new philanthropy” in Orange County, where younger givers from the technology sector are stepping to the fore.

Samueli and his family have given a series of seven- and eight-figure gifts to education, local synagogues and the arts. Those include $27 million to UC Irvine, $25 million to UCLA, $5.5 million to the Ocean Institute in Dana Point and $5 million to Opera Pacific.

The Samueli gift arrives in an economy recently clouded by stock market declines, predictions of a national slowdown, and an electricity crisis in California that is seen as a potentially crippling threat. Indeed, Samueli’s own worth has declined by billions since last summer; Broadcom Corp., the computer chip company he co-founded, has seen its stock fall by more than half, from a high of $273 a share last August to its current $104.

Center officials think their fund drive can ride on schedule atop the economic turbulence.

“It’s not as easy as it looked a year ago, but [prospective donors] are not saying, ‘I can’t give because my stock is down,’ ” said Roger T. Kirwan, the center’s chairman.

The existing center, opened in 1986, was built primarily with money from fortunes made in real estate development. Henry T. Segerstrom, the South Coast Plaza shopping center mogul who was the prime mover behind the $73-million fund drive for the original center, is also the cornerstone of the expansion campaign. His family has given the land for the expansion, valued at roughly $11 million, and Segerstrom’s additional $40-million pledge, announced last summer, is the cornerstone of the $200-million campaign.

Mandel said that planning and design work for the expanded center is moving ahead on schedule; officials expect to begin construction in spring 2002 and open the new wing during the fall of 2004 or early in 2005.