Mayor’s Budget Not Enough to Save Lincoln Theatre’s Subsidized Programs
In his budget for Fiscal 2008, Mayor Adrian Fenty has proposed $250,000 be set aside for the Lincoln Theatre, half of what the theatre requested. The sum would come from the fiscal 2008 budget for the D.C. Commission on Arts and Humanities, the Budget Support Act says.
But according to executive director Janice Hill, without a $500,000 sum from the city, the theater will be forced to abandon its subsidized programs–programs that are either free to the public or are produced by nonprofit organizations. That means no more high school graduations at the theater, no more free dance performances for middle schoolers, and no more annual events commemorating the Holocaust, Hill says. “It’s not good…I’ve asked for the city’s help. They have responded by giving us half of what we asked for.”
In January, the Washington Post reported that the 85-year-old Lincoln Theatre had $1,362 in the bank and might close unless it received an influx of cash fast.
Now, the theater is operating in the red. “We’ve borrowed deep into our credit line,” Hill says. “We are robbing Peter to pay Paul. This does not help us. Like all similar historical institutions, we cannot make it through rentals alone. This does not provide adequate help, nor assist in providing funding to re-tool the theatre to be a primarily, commercial facility.”
In February, the Fenty administration facilitated a grant from the Department of Housing and Community Development, Hill says, to provide cultural enrichment programs for underserved students and seniors, but that money was not earmarked for operational costs and cannot be used for the endangered nonprofit programming.
Meanwhile, the theater’s lease, under the U Street Theatre Foundation, is up in June, Hill says. And while the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development has proposed that a developer take over the historic theater, Hill says “that strategy would have to be handled very cautiously.” She worries a developer with commercial interests would have a “tough time responding to the original mission of the theater.”
Cutting the subsidized programs also threatens the theater’s mission, Hill says. These programs are “highly valued” and are part of the theater’s commitment to providing services to the community. For example, she says, 1,200 middle school students attended the Capitol Movement Project dance performance for free March 29. The Lincoln Theatre has also held graduation ceremonies for Cesar Chavez Public Charter School for Public Policy, Booker T. Washington Public Charter School, and Roosevelt High School.
“The new administration…may not be educated or sensitized to the value, the passion, the energy the community feels,” about the theater, Hill says.
The mayor’s budget also proposes $500,000 for the Source Theatre, whose financial woes made headlines last year.
Carrie Brooks, spokesperson for the mayor, says that, in addition to the money included in the budget, the two theaters will be able to compete for additional funding through the city’s competitive grant process.
April 2nd, 2007 at 6:56 pm
There is something fundamentally wrong here. Ms. Hill’s appeals sound more idiotic the longer one considers them.
Although I may have read the Post article incorrectly, the Lincoln has received $250 grand a year for the past five years, and now Hill wants to double the budget. For what? The Clipse and Method Man perform for the white ultrahip masses at the 930, and meanwhile the stage that formerly bore the soul of Ella and Satchmo gets junior-varsity step-shows and high school graduations. High school graduations!?!? Is there anything more heinously boring than a high school graduation? I say, please end these painful Anglo vestiges, and not just the ones at the Lincoln — cancel every one from Capitol Heights to Fairfax and pay the teachers more. That should be one of Fenty’s first executive orders once he captures the run of our school system. I wouldn’t care if I never saw a mortarboard or heard Pomp and Circumstance again for the rest of my life. Ms. Hill wants the sympathy of the community, but if she is going to get it she should stop threatening to bore us all to death.
April 4th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
Didn’t a Dupont Circle newspaper publish something questioning Hill’s management of the Lincoln Theatre? Are they getting as many rental as they should? Years ago, IMP/930 Club used the theatre for a concert or 2. How come that is not happening anymore? Yea, maybe bigger indie-rock shows do better at Strathmore (at least the few that have been out ther like the Decemberists), but the House of Blues wants to come to DC and do indie-rock shows downtown in a space that I think is bigger than the 930. The Birchmere has booked some shows at the Warner. Someone ought to talk to area promoters and see why they’re not renting the Lincoln.
April 6th, 2007 at 1:59 am
The Lincoln re-hab was half-baked and half-done. The unfinished part of the structure, the underground Colonnade room, was more important in the lives of DC residents than the theater upstairs. It was where cotillions, frat parties, and weddings took place, and where couples danced to all the great jazz bands you read about. Economically, the Colonnade allowed a second, steadier flow of income for the Lincoln. The Colonnade was filled in years ago, but should have been reconstructed as part of the re-hab. It is not the nonprofit foundation’s fault that the city did shoddy, ill-considered work.
Re the quarter-mill from the Arts Commission: why not take it out of the $1.5 million in non-competitive program grants DCCAH distributes each year? While DC is at it, start to peer-review the millions in non-competitive capital grants to arts and cultural institutions that flow like some subterranean river through the DC budget.