The Arts Centre is alive and well – let’s make sure it stays that way
Int he decade or so since the earthquakes, the Arts Centre has fully restored 20 of the 22 damaged Category 1 stone buildings on time and on budget. There is unanimous agreement that the buildings are all more stunning than ever before. Even better, they’re humming with culturally diverse activity, bringing in people young and old from all over town and further afield.
The Arts Centre ran a massive postearthquake restoration fundraising campaign, raising $38 million to supplement the $168m insurance payout so it could fully restore the Category 1 stone buildings, building back better.
The trust’s strategy involved prioritising the completion of these Category 1 buildings.
But it’s another building, ironically the only Category 2 one, that all the fuss is now about – the old Student Union building which housed the popular Dux de Lux.
I remember it well, the brews, the bands, the food, the atmosphere. How great it was to sit outside in the courtyard grabbing some rays over a cold beer while listening to a band and solving the world’s problems with your mates.
Sadly, ReDux’s plan to restore and reopen the Dux proposed no financial return to the Arts Centre for the next 50 years and, as trustees, we couldn’t accept this for future generations.
The problem is, any potential developer needs to raise $12m to fully restore the old Dux buildings (there are several of them all falling on each other). But without being able to secure investors with equity in land or buildings (under the Arts Centre’s governing act of Parliament, land and buildings cannot be sold), any prospective developer will find capitalraising hard going.
We worked with ReDux trying to find some way to accommodate them, but no return for us was a sticking point. Also, fundraising for this would have potentially lost us the same or similar pots of money that we would be targeting in order to complete the Category 1 buildings’ restoration. So in 2022, we set ReDux’s offer aside.
There seems a view that a revived Dux would provide the Arts Centre with its most lucrative lease income, but a lot has changed since pre-earthquakes, and this is not the case.
The University of Canterbury’s School of Music, the Observatory Hotel and the growing Health Tech Centre have way surpassed any income possible from a brew bar-restaurant, no matter how popular. And we don’t need to rely on a bar to bring people into the Arts Centre – already we have overtaken preearthquake visitor numbers with around a million visitors last year.
How ironic that after the country’s biggest ever restoration of heritage buildings, then repopulating the campus so it is now humming with creativity and visitors, the city council proposes to withdraw the vital funding we received in the last long-term plan and put years of investment at risk.
The Arts Centre is owned and run by a citizens’ trust and governed by that act of Parliament. So, if trustees have to begin dissolving the Arts Centre Trust from July due to impending insolvency without the council’s annual grant, a new owner will need to be found. This will probably be decided by the High Court, and the only other organisation with a similar publicinterest remit is the council.
If this happens, all the funding the Arts Centre seeks in the current council draft long-term plan, plus significant legal fees, will then fall directly on the ratepayer.
Some critics say the Arts Centre in Christchurch could be more commercially run. But doing so would have a catastrophic effect on the reason it exists.
Under the trust deed, and its governing Arts Centre of Christchurch Act, the Arts Centre is required to focus on arts and cultural tenancies, activities and events, with the aim of making the site a vibrant hub attracting locals and visitors alike.
To achieve this, most of the centre is leased out at full market rates. But because the Arts Centre is defined as a community centre, a large number of market-rentable spaces must be set aside for creative community use, which cannot provide a commercial return.
Spaces such as the Maker Workshop, Te Whare Tapere, a creative space for ngā toi Māori, the public museums, the Observatory and its telescope for winter-night public star-gazing, and events such as the annual Matariki Festival (the biggest in the city), Sculpture Festival, Off Centre Arts Festival, and school holiday activities engage a a range of communities.
Not to mention the annual Creative Residencies (such as Bic Runga, who kicked off the programme again in 2019), regular music and family events.
The Arts Centre market, which has been smaller and only on Sundays, is soon coming back bigger and better on Saturdays too.
Many critics don’t understand the challenges of running a vibrant arts centre in a city block filled with 23 highmaintenance heritage buildings under current legal, health and safety, and insurance constraints.
Operating costs, including insurance of $1.2m a year (1000% more than pre-earthquakes) and $205,000 annual rates, cannot be passed on to tenants – they are simply too high to allow a commercial return on buildings valued at nearly $500m.
Some critics have also had a go at the Arts Centre staffing, believing it could be more cheaply run by fewer people on much lower pay. Currently, the management team of three (property, finance and programmes/ festivals/events) is paid less than equivalent roles at the Art Gallery.
“Management” is actually a bit of a misnomer. In a small team, everyone puts the chairs out at events and helps out anywhere else on site when needed.
Two staff (including a manager) also run the Arts Centre’s own ticketing, box office, technical, stage management, front of house and community engagement – most arts organisations contract these services in at quite a cost.
At the city council, there is a core team for each annual festival. This year, the Arts Centre’s small events team will deliver four arts and cultural festivals in addition to regular events programming. If the city council ended up running the Arts Centre by decree of the High Court, staff would be paid more, and you can be sure more staff would be added to fill the gaps, instead of our adaptable, already stretched team.
The Arts Centre is thriving. Why let it die by spending what could be years pursuing a new owner through the courts? The only beneficiaries of that would be lawyers and meanwhile, the vibrant creative hub we know today would die.