Latino groups may share LATC

The city-owned Los Angeles Theatre Center in downtown L.A. would be shared by two Latino arts organizations in a proposal that reached the City Council’s budget and finance committee Tuesday.

The committee took no action on the proposal but voted 4-1 to sideline a motion to approve a city contract with the winners of the city’s earlier search for an LATC management company.

In the new proposal, Latino Theater Company and the Latino Museum of History, Art and Culture would share LATC, with each contributing $4 million.

The theater company would use a $4-million grant it received from the California Cultural and Historical Endowment Board.

The state agency is distributing $276 million from the $2.6 billion approved by state voters in Proposition 40, a mostly parks-oriented bond measure in 2000.

Latino Theater Company received the agency’s single largest grant. Terms of the grant require that it be used for capital expenditures on culturally or historically significant projects, so the theater company’s money would pay for building renovations.

LATC’s three largest stages would continue to be used as theaters, but the building’s small black-box space and the lobby, a basement area and offices would be used as galleries by the museum.

The museum received more than $5 million from the city as compensation for being forced to leave its previous quarters at 112 S. Main St. in 2002 to make way for the new Caltrans building.

Stan Sosa, secretary of the museum board, said that about $4.5 million remains as an endowment, and the museum would use the interest on that amount to pay for its operations in its new home.

The deal is hardly sealed.

After a panel appointed by the city’s Cultural Affairs Department evaluated proposals to run LATC in 2003, Latino Theater Company’s bid placed second to the winning bid from developer Tom Gilmore and Will & Company, a resident company at LATC that focuses on youth theater programs.

The Latino Theater proposal lost points over concerns about the company’s fund-raising abilities -- but this was before the company won its state grant.

Attempts to bring Latino Theater Company into the Gilmore plan failed, and a Cultural Affairs decision to use Gilmore as an interim manager was overturned in April 2004 by the City Council.

At the budget committee meeting Tuesday, the Latino theater and museum idea was assailed by Gilmore and representatives of Will & Co. Speakers from the area’s neighborhood council also raised questions about the proposal. The committee decided to ask the city administrative officer and the chief legislative analyst for a report on the city’s legal options.

Officials of the Latino Theater Company assured the committee that other theater companies could continue using LATC and that it would not be an exclusively Latino venue. Robert Rosen, dean of the UCLA theater school -- where Latino Theater Company’s artistic director, Jose Luis Valenzuela, teaches -- said UCLA students would intern at LATC as part of the plan.

The company’s chairman, Moctesuma Esparza, noted that his organization would not be burdened by the bond repayment obligations that helped cause the collapse of LATC’s first resident company in 1991.

Gilmore was unimpressed. He said he would take legal action if necessary, adding, “We’re not going to let them hijack LATC.”