By the time you read this, the Great Turtle of Auditorium Shores may be one baby step closer to becoming a 21st-century home for the performing arts in Austin. Or its mottled shell could be even more firmly secured as the dome of choice for the crafts shows, trade shows, and other sundry events that currently keep Palmer Auditorium bustling 300 days out of the year. That’s because the day this issue hits the streets – Thursday, March 12 – city council is scheduled to vote on a resolution directing the city manager to negotiate a long-term lease of Palmer to a local nonprofit, Greater Austin Performing Arts Center.
GAPAC is the entity formed from the rock-and-a-hard-place plight of local arts organizations which have their home at Bass Concert Hall in the UT Performing Arts Center. These institutions – primarily Austin Lyric Opera, the Austin Symphony, and Ballet Austin – have experienced serious growth in recent years and would like to expand their performance schedules at the PAC. But they’ve been warned by UT, which has experienced its own serious growth at the PAC and which has first dibs on scheduling it, that the PAC will change its scheduling procedures come 2003. The changes basically tighten UT’s hold on prime dates at Bass, and while that won’t shut out any local entity from using the facility, it sure isn’t likely to give these groups the room to schedule lots more dates than they do now. So the groups have begun looking elsewhere. Only there isn’t an elsewhere, not in Austin right now at any rate. Alternative spaces with seats in the couple thousand range will have to be created, and that’s where Palmer fits in. Creating such a space from an existing facility is considerably cheaper than building one new, and Palmer’s structure lends itself to just such a makeover (not to mention the amenities that come with it: location, location, location, and parking, parking, parking). So, for the last two years, these arts groups have been gathering support for a renovation of Palmer into a full-scale performing arts facility. They’ve held meetings, solicited ideas, and courted allies.
Chief among these, at least as far as the council meeting this week is concerned, is Mayor Kirk Watson. Hizzoner will be introducing the resolution, and, as many a council petitioner has discovered during his first term, the mayor can be mighty persuasive when he needs support for a project he likes.
That’s not to say that a renovated Palmer is a foregone conclusion. For starters, the exhibitors who use the facility currently aren’t at all eager to vacate it for the city’s culture club. They find Palmer suits their needs pretty well as is and, more importantly, suits them better than any other city facility they could move into. So, they can be expected to put up a healthy show of opposition before council. But even if GAPAC scores the council’s endorsement, it still has to negotiate the lease process, which could be a minefield of public-private liability issues. And even if GAPAC breezes through that, it still has to take on the Herculean chore of raising $50 million to fund the renovation and an endowment fund to cover operations. Oh, and that money – more than any arts group in town has ever raised before – will need to be raised in about two years. Whew!
Of course, as the enterprising heroes of bad sci-fi films and spy TV shows are wont to say: It’s just crazy enough, it might work. Cities with less enthusiasm for their downtowns and their arts scenes have pulled off similar projects. Perhaps it’s the right time for Austin to do it.
The resolution is Agenda Item #37.
This article appears in March 13 • 1998 and March 13 • 1998 (Cover).