Auxillaries intended to be self-sufficient will lose $871,000; theater biggest loser; taxpayers to make up loss
What if you managed a theater and it lost a half million dollars or more every year over the past five years? What if you obtained a $5 million dollar loan to improve the seating, lighting, technology, and add a fancy kitchen to the theater? Then, after all that, you incurred a loss this past year of $680,000? What do you think would happen to you? And your theater project?
Well, for Prescott based Yavapai Community College administrators there is nothing to worry about when projects like these lose millions of dollars. They simply dip into the taxpayer pot of money available to them and make-up for the losses. No fuss; no concern; for them, no big deal.
For example, the 1105 seat theater on the Prescott campus, dubbed by campus administrators as the Performing Arts Center, is now estimated to have gone into the hole the past academic year by at least $680 thousand dollars. The huge loss was incurred in spite of a $5 million dollar renovation project covering the past five years, which was paid for through county property taxes.
The theater, with many programs not reasonably accessible to many County residents outside the Prescott area, continues to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars.
One of the renovation projects many felt was not needed involved installation of a kitchen at a cost of around $750,000 to make the campus theater a dinner theater. If financial loses are any indication of how well the dinner theater worked, well, it didn’t work.
Auxiliaries, which are viewed as campus businesses of sorts, are intended to break even. This past year the Community College auxiliaries, which include the theater, failed to break-even by $871,000. Recall that Prescott administrators closed the Sedona Film school, an actual academic program, because they claimed it was being too highly subsidized. However, it is doubtful they would ever consider closing a nonacademic project such as this theater because, as they see it, it brings culture to the city of Prescott and prestige to them. Source: August 2014 Governing Board Agenda with reports.