O.C. Arts Groups Petition National Fund

Several Orange County arts organizations have begun preliminary negotiations with the National Arts Stabilization Fund, a private, New York-based organization that has given millions of dollars to arts institutions around the country.

Officials at the Stabilization Fund, which awards grants to groups of arts organizations in distinct communities, look at prospective recipients and their communities to determine their ability to match grants (of up to $1 million per arts organization) on a 2-to-1 basis.

The fund’s current “local stabilization projects” aid arts groups in Phoenix, Seattle, Boston and Kansas City, Mo. “We are discussing possible projects with several other communities, with Orange County no more on the top of the list than a number of others,” said Marcia Thompson, president of the nonprofit organization, which was established in 1983 with $9 million from the Ford, Andrew W. Mellon and Rockefeller foundations.

“We haven’t even established . . . whether the community has the capability to put up the (matching) funds,” Thompson said.

Henry T. Segerstrom, chairman of the Orange County Performing Arts Center, started negotiations with the fund to find additional sources of support for the county’s arts organizations, Center President Thomas R. Kendrick said Thursday.

Late last year, Segerstrom and Kendrick requested financial data from the Orange County Philharmonic Society, South Coast Repertory, the Pacific Symphony and Opera Pacific. Together with the Center itself, those groups raised a total of $122 million over the past decade, according to Kendrick.

Segerstrom and Kendrick then met with officials from the groups (and the Newport Harbor Art Museum) in January and are now supplying more information to the Stabilization Fund, Kendrick said. It can take between one and five years to determine eligibility for funding, Thompson said.

While the Center could receive money from the fund, the grants would principally benefit arts groups “less (financially) stable than we are,” Kendrick said, specifically citing Opera Pacific and the Pacific Symphony, which reportedly has an accumulated deficit of at least $350,000.

The Stabilization Fund, designed in large part to increase organizations’ working capital, allows no more than half of any single grant to be used to reduce a current (not accumulated) deficit, Thompson said. The rest is intended to increase cash reserves. None of the grant may be used for annual operations.

Louis G. Spisto, Pacific Symphony executive director, said: “Our five-year financial plan calls for us eliminating our deficit by 1994 without the assistance of this fund. With the fund, we’d be able to retire the deficit and then build a cash reserve of what would probably be in excess of $1 million by that year.”

Shoring up the fiscal strength of local groups that use the Center could provide indirect benefits to the Center as well. Officials there say they plan to build an additional concert hall and a smaller theater, both reliant on the financial stability of local groups that would use them and possibly help pay for construction.