The Walton Arts Center has become Fayetteville’s Frankenstein’s monster.
The center, lovingly created with public support and Fayetteville’s tax dollars in 1992, is the “Adam” of Fayetteville’s labors, the genesis of an artistic and economic revival sorely needed on Dickson Street and for the region. Fayetteville and the University of Arkansas, powered by a major donation from the Walton family, joyfully birthed the arts center’s life out of nothing and has enjoyed its company for 21 years.
But in recent years, it has become harder for the leadership and the residents of Fayetteville to recognize what they helped create. The arts center council and its executive director, Peter Lane, have strained relationships with surprises and lack of openness about their extensive plans. Some will contend Fayetteville is just soured because it lost out on the expansion opportunities of a new, larger performance theater going to Bentonville and now the Arkansas Music Pavilion’s move to Rogers.
But as much as any of the four big cities, Fayetteville embraces the concept that a better Northwest Arkansas means a better Fayetteville.
Fayetteville is no sore loser.
No, it’s not the location of the AMP or any other facility that threatens relationships. It’s a lack of confidence, earned under Lane’s leadership, that the Walton Arts Center can be trusted.
Time after time in recent years, the symbiotic relationship born in the arts center’s founding has faced abuse as the arts center seeks cooperation on one level even while hiding other actions on important matters, ones that Fayetteville cares deeply about. There appears to be a brazen indifference to the once healthy relationship the center had with Fayetteville leaders.
Lane has made it clear he believes the business of the Walton Arts Center is nobody’s business until he says it’s their business.
Having benefited from millions of dollars in public funding at its creation, the arts center has increasingly taken a stance that its creator entities - the city of Fayetteville and the University of Arkansas - are barriers to be overcome, not partners to be embraced. Well, that is, unless the arts center needs their money.
Consider that Steve Clark, the chamber executive and former attorney general appointed by the city of Fayetteville to the Walton Art Center Council, learned only a few days ago of the arts center’s plan to relocate the Arkansas Music Pavilion from Fayetteville to Rogers. This was not a plan that just fell in place in recent days. Lane and Co. say they not only have the acreage lined up, but also 90 percent of the $11 million needed from private donors.
How can that happen without Clark knowing about it, especially when he’s on the council’s facilities committee?
It takes an abundance of relational indifference and arrogance to seek and receive the mayor’s backing for a multimillion bond issue to expand the Dickson Street theater and to ask members of the Advertising and Promotion Commission for $8.5 million in Fayetteville taxpayer dollars, while you’re also working behind the scenes to move a major arts amenity and attraction out of Fayetteville. All of this from an entity created to look out for Fayetteville and the university’s best interests even as it grows beyond Fayetteville’s borders.
Remember, it’s the ad commission’s job to spend its tax dollars to attract more people to Fayetteville. That’s why it offered the Walton Arts Center $500,000 toward a new permanent home for the AMP in Fayetteville.
But the AMP’s pending move to Rogers will represent a loss of visitors to Fayetteville that won’t likely be made up with an expanded lobby and new green rooms at the Dickson Street site.
The move is just the latest installment of arts center surprises seemingly snubbing Fayetteville.
Let’s remember the 2010 timeline and process to select the site for a new, larger performing arts theater, created by the arts center itself to supposedly promote transparency and a quality decision. It was mysteriously cut short.
Fayetteville submitted the most detailed, thoroughly researched and convincingly presented 30-page proposal of 25 received. Bentonville faxed in a two-page, vague pledge to find 10 acres within a half-mile of the downtown square. The decision was set for early 2011.
Then, on Dec. 1, 2010, a dog-and-pony show the likes of which I’d never witnessed was set in motion. First, an arts center committee, with little substantive discussion, recommended Bentonville. Moments later, the full board met and picked Bentonville, home of the Walton family that earlier promised it would not be the lead sponsor for a new facility unless it was built in their hometown.
With a few minutes to shift into a pre-staged press conference, Peter Lane glowed with enthusiasm while the prepared soundtrack played and a Powerpoint presentation hailed the new future of the arts center.
Well, one does go to the theater for great staged performances. Fayetteville leaders politely accepted the expedited decision, seeing little evidence its proposal had even been read.
There remained the promise of a smaller, 600-seat theater arts center officials said would be built in Fayetteville.
Mayor Lioneld Jordan went to the ad commission to start planting seeds for the funding, but the arts center offered no supporting data and asked for more time. Then the University of Arkansas, encouraged by the Walton Arts Center, announced its plans for an on-campus concert hall. With that, the arts center said, its need for a Fayetteville-based smaller theater evaporated. Another surprise.
Fayetteville, even among such shenanigans, agreed to implement an unpopular paid parking system to make a parking deck possible. It agreed to give the arts center $287,000 a year from paid parking proceeds. It’s taking on $6.5 million in debt to build that parking deck adjacent to the arts center starting later this year.
Fayetteville has been abundantly good to the Walton Arts Center.
Bentonville expansion?
Disappointment, but good for the region. The AMP in Rogers? OK, one can make an argument. But surprising one of the arts center’s founding entities repeatedly through secrecy and behind-the-scenes deal-making, all the while expecting the community to pony up more money?
That’s brash.
Frankenstein’s monster?
The people of Fayetteville aren’t gathering their torches and pitchforks, but they know something strange is going on up at the castle.
GREG HARTON IS OPINION PAGE EDITOR FOR NWA MEDIA.
Opinion, Pages 5 on 05/27/2013