Tourism Commission considers consequences of decaying Dougherty Arts Center

Local arts leaders and members of the Tourism Commission hope to bring City Council’s attention to the lack of action on the deteriorating Dougherty Arts Center, which has been caught in a sort of planning and budgetary limbo for more than a year.

At last week’s Tourism Commission meeting, Laura Esparza, executive director of the arts nonprofit A3 (formerly Art Alliance Austin), discussed how the slow decay of the building could endanger a number of local theater productions and other arts events in the coming years. With that programming serving as a training ground for local actors, muralists, visual artists and more, she said the impact to the local tourism economy could become substantial if the city doesn’t make a decision about the planned construction of a new facility near the ZACH Theatre. Part of that decision, she said, should involve improving giving for the arts by local and national philanthropic organizations.

“Other communities have small foundations and they have nonprofit, local arts agencies and they have a business council for the arts. We have none of that infrastructure to help sustain a healthy arts economy here,” she said. “What suffers is not only the artists, but tourism, and that’s where I’m bringing this back to you. … This whole journey has developed into a big idea that maybe we need to build public will to value the arts, and in doing so change the future of the arts by inspiring people to give.”

City bond packages over the last decade-plus had provided $28 million in funding for a new DAC, though the cost for the project had ballooned to more than $60 million in recent years due to a combination of inflation and a 2019 decision by City Council to require an underground parking structure in the project.

The Covid-19 pandemic put a hard pause on any plans for the new facility, which was designed to occupy 45,000 square feet, and earlier this year staff from the Parks and Recreation Department suggested eliminating the garage and using a phased construction approach. Doing so would allow the $28 million to be deployed for a smaller-scale DAC that could conceivably be expanded as more funding becomes available, possibly from a bond package expected to go before voters in 2026.

In hopes of sparking some action from City Council, Esparza’s group has created a template letter for residents to use to contact their Council member regarding the question of how to move the Dougherty forward.

The commission took no action on the matter but individual members discussed near-term options for funding the DAC as well as arts in general, possibly through better use of Hotel Occupancy Tax money available to the city.

“When we talk about the tourism impact of a small community public arts center, we have to know, or at least realize, how it contributes and scales up the entire ecosystem. To lose the spaces that she’s talking about – and the theater program and the gallery program from the Dougherty – would be a huge blow that would take a decade or more to recover from,” Commissioner John Riedie said. “It would ultimately impact our ability to attract commercial productions. The fewer theater and and acting professionals you have in a city, the harder it is to get productions here because they don’t want to have to fly all their extras in from Atlanta and L.A. – they want to come to a place that has a good stock of professional extras. We get those from these grassroots spaces, like the publicly owned Dougherty.”

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Posted In: Austin, District 9