Samuelis Donate $10 Million to Arts Center

High-tech multibillionaire 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. They also announced a total of $15 million in smaller donations.

The new donations 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.

The gift from the Samueli Foundation arrives amid an economy recently clouded by stock-market declines, predictions of a national slowdown, and an electricity crisis in California.

Indeed, Samueli’s 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 in August to its current $104. Broadcom’s stock price fell $20.94 on Thursday, a 17% decline.

Center officials think their fund drive can stay on schedule amid 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. He hopes the Samueli gift will underscore for other potential major donors the importance of philanthropy, even in uncertain times.

Samueli, 46, and his family, who live in Corona del Mar, have given seven- and eight-figure gifts to education, to local synagogues and to the arts. These gifts include $27 million to UC Irvine, $25 million to UCLA, $5.5 million to the Ocean Institute in Dana Point, $5 million to Opera Pacific, $3 million to Temple Beth El in Aliso Viejo and $1.5 million to Chapman University.

Jerry E. Mandel, the center’s president, said that Samueli 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, in which younger givers from the technology sector are stepping to the fore.

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 expected to be the largest of the $200-million campaign.

The anonymous $5-million donor was something of a surprise, Kirwan said: unlike most of the large contributors to date, the person had not previously given to the center.

Mark Chapin Johnson, chairman of the fund-raising campaign, said that 25 to 30 gifts of six figures or more have been received. There has been something of a tactical shift in the fund-raising approach. Mandel previously had said the center would make a public appeal for donations of all sizes when the campaign reached the $100-million, halfway mark. Center officials said Thursday they now expect the “silent phase,” in which prospective major donations are courted privately, will last the rest of this year.

Hopes are now that $150 million can be raised before the center makes its appeal to all comers. Mandel said that planning and design work are moving ahead on schedule; officials expect to begin construction in the spring of 2002 and open the new wing during the fall of 2004 or early in 2005.

Also announced Thursday were a $2-million donation from the Bank of America Foundation and $1-million pledges from 13 private and corporate donors: Benjamin and Carmela Du, Paul F. and Daranne Folino, Michael and Eleanor Gordon, Mark Chapin Johnson and Barbara Hiller Johnson, Roger T. and Gail Kirwan, Thomas H. and Marilyn O. Nielsen, Jeanette E. Segerstrom, Nick and Heidi Shahrestany, the Theodore J. and Janice F. Smith Family Foundation, Elizabeth Colyear Vincent, the Boeing Company Charitable Trust, the Orange County Register division of Freedom Communications, Inc. and the Wells Fargo Foundation.