Mt. Crested Butte Performing Arts Center pushing to raise $3 million

Money would be leveraged 3-to-1 with public, private funds

Since the idea to build a world-class performance facility in the Gunnison Valley got off the ground four years ago, fundraising for the venture has proceeded quietly in fits and starts. But with a recent promise of $3 million hanging in the balance, the Mt. Crested Butte Performing Arts Center (MCBPAC) capital campaign team is taking its vision to the masses.

As part of a final push to bring the project’s total funding to a point where planning can move forward, MCBPAC executive director Woody Sherwood says his organization’s capital campaign committee has put together a Founders Circle Community Challenge grant worth $3 million. It’s money in the bank, as soon as the team raises enough money to match it.  
“We had some people who said they would name the facility and some other people said they would help with the challenge,” Sherwood says. “Now, we’re looking for the community match.”
Already the town of Mt. Crested Butte, through its Downtown Development Authority, has spent more than $200,000 and will have saved about $1.5 million of the $6 million promised to the project, if the MCBPAC can match the contribution. When formed, the DDA was authorized to issue bonds for as much as $25 million.
Land donations from Crested Butte Mountain Resort and the town are worth another $2.4 million. Combined with the cash committed to the project, the group’s pledges of more than $14 million could turn to cash if the final $3 million is raised this summer.
“We’ve had 22 contributors in roughly the last two-and-a-half months when we decided to start the challenge campaign that contributed the $3 million,” MCBPAC capital campaign committee chairman Jim Hogue says. “So there’s been broad support for the project from the community.” So far, Sherwood says the project has a total of around 60 contributors of small gifts and some seven-figure gifts.
Capital campaign counsel Bud Franks says the fund-raising effort has gone along generally as expected, with a silent phase and then a major gifts phase, which they just finished with the Founders Circle Community Challenge. Between the Community Challenge and the $6 million match offered by the town, the MCBPAC capital campaign committee has secured 3-to-1 leveraging on the $3 million they hope to raise this summer.
In its brochure to potential donors, the MCBPAC says, “Reaching the 2013 goal will also allow the final architectural and contractor selection, development of the final plans and groundbreaking for fall of 2014 or spring of 2015 with occupancy in July of 2016.”
To motivate potential donors, the MCBPAC has released its list of naming opportunities, ranging from $1.5 million for the performance hall down to several opportunities for $100,000. And after the state declared the MCBPAC an economic development project, Colorado residents can get a 25 percent tax break on their contribution.
“We’re very, very confident we can raise the money by the end of the calendar year. Once this $3 million challenge is met, it triggers a number of things going forward, not least of which is securing a design team Franks said. Usually on these projects, a very exciting part of the project is when the building starts coming up out of the ground and you can gauge where you’re headed. Then you continue the campaign.”
And while the money raised so far is less than half of the Performing Arts Center’s proposed $23.5 million price tag, it’s still a lot of money and nearly enough to start what Sherwood and the rest of his team see as a requisite piece of the Gunnison Valley’s economic puzzle.
Hogue points to the way money spent on the arts is said to recalculate in a community, creating some three-and-a-half times the economic impact as the original money spent.
“These buildings are economic engines for communities and they have been since Lincoln Center in New York City. It’s why communities all across the country build them,” Franks says. “It never fails, it doesn’t matter what the size is, they’re economic and cultural engines as gathering places for a community.”
In comparing mountain resort areas, not having a 500-seat performing arts center makes Mt. Crested Butte a notable exception among the likes of Steamboat Springs, Jackson Hole and Teton Village, Beaver Creek, Aspen, Vail or Telluride.
Of those communities, Steamboat, Aspen and Telluride all have more than one facility, which is the ultimate goal in the Gunnison Valley as the Crested Butte Center for the Arts hopes to have an expansion of its own in the next few years.
Programming from the Center for the Arts and its partners, including rehearsals and performances that are part of Crested Butte Music Festival, is outgrowing its space on Sixth Street in Crested Butte. The hope for the Center for the Arts is to have 2,300 additional square feet of rehearsal space, a room dedicated to dance, 1,900 square feet of classroom space and another 1,000 square feet for multipurpose use.
Together, Hogue thinks, the facilities will make the East River Valley a destination for the arts with untold economic benefits for the valley’s residents. “This place is so beautiful that when you have a facility like the one we’re talking about, it makes us stand apart.”
Such a facility would provide the music festival suitable practice space for visiting musicians and offer performances to the public in spaces more suited to the show. And while the Center for the Arts expansion takes place, space could be made available in the MCBPAC for the Center’s displaced programs, if the two projects can be coordinated.
“We want to be complementary to the Center for the Arts, not competitive. They’re doing a very important function in the community,” Sherwood says. “We think the Mallardi Theater plays an important part in the community and we think likewise this Performing Arts Center will play an important role in the community. They’re all different things, but what they do, they do well.”
Hogue adds, “It’s a matter of how we can cooperate to make the entire community stronger.”
Speaking to the need for a performing arts facility in the Gunnison Valley, the Crested Butte Music Festival is at the forefront among the MCBPAC’s partners, hosting events and promoting the idea whenever possible, including the July 20 announcement of the donor whose name (or whatever name they choose) will be attached to the new facility.
Over the last decade, the music festival has grown tremendously, from its roots as a small mountain gathering into one of the country’s premier gatherings of young and established musicians, attracting talent from the New York Metropolitan Opera and the Royal Opera House in London, as well as top-level students from around the country for the Marcello Giordani Young Artists Program.
“You can just go on and on,” Hogue says of the talent coming to the valley for the CBMF, “but they’re going to need a better venue if we’re going to keep them here.”
As music festival director Alexander Schierle says, “We have outgrown our suit.”
Sherwood says, “In the summer, we’ve been doing okay. But the challenge we have with some of the institutions that are helping to drive the summer tourism is that they’re not going to continue to attract the kind of talent they have here without the type of facility that is commensurate with their abilities.”
The talent and the high level of performances being associated with the CBMF have driven ticket sales and pushed the capacity of every performance venue in the East River Valley.  
“If you’ve seen one of the operas at the Center [for the Arts], the orchestra is behind and the performers are there. There’s no room,” former Crested Butte Music Festival president and current MCBPAC co-president Tom Biery said last year. “And in fact we have to get fire variances.”
Keeping the ultimate $23 million goal in mind, Sherwood says $17 million is where things really start to happen. “Seventeen million basically creates $12.5 million to $13 million in construction money,” Sherwood says. “Even if that’s as far as we can go, it’s still a good chunk of money.”
Sherwood was hesitant to say what a pared-down version of the facility might look like and was confident that the entire dream could be realized eventually, even if it happened in phases.
Although the design of the building is purely conceptual at this point, instead of the maximum of 400 seats currently available for performances, the new facility would have no fewer than 500 seats, as well as a stage design and the lighting and sound technology to support almost any performance.
“The gold standard is essentially a 500-seat facility,” Sherwood says, explaining the searches people conduct of performance venues online, that often kick out venues with even 499 seats.
Hogue says, “Five hundred seats maintains some of the intimacy. People come here and don’t want to feel like they’re in Lincoln Center. They want to feel up close and personal while the performance is going on.”
Beyond the performances, the envisioned MCBPAC will also have classrooms and practice rooms, as well as meeting and conference space that can be used during the music festival and throughout the year for paying corporate clients or local non-profits.   
“It’s a living, breathing arts institutions that brings the community together,” Franks says.
As an arts center and as an economic driver in the valley, the project has gotten endorsements from politicians and community leaders like Colorado Senator Gail Schwartz and former Western State Colorado University president Jay Helman.
And as an idea that has started to take root in the community, the MCBPAC is growing. Sherwood says, “Where we’re at from a momentum perspective this year, compared to last year, is people are looking at it and realizing it is going to happen.”