Who will own and operate Lansing’s performing arts center? 

Two and a half months after Lansing Mayor Andy Schor announced plans to build a downtown performing arts center, the players are still backstage, working out who will own and operate it. 

Meanwhile, the project team has contacted a venue similar to the planned Lansing facility, Old Forester’s Paristown Hall in Louisville, Kentucky, for advice on how to proceed with the next step — fundraising and marketing naming opportunities. 

“The focus for the past two months is on getting the ownership and management model right,” Dominic Cochran, director of the Lansing Public Media Center, co-director of the Capital City Film Festival and a key player in the project, said.  

“We’re close to an answer,” he said. “We still feel good about breaking ground and going vertical in fall of this year, or first thing next year, with the goal of opening in fall 2024.” 

The proposed venue is designed to fill a hole in the local arts and entertainment market and draw national rock, country, hip-hop, comedy and other attractions that now skip Lansing to play in Detroit or Grand Rapids. 

It would also fill a physical gap, a mostly vacant lot at the corner of Washington Avenue and Lenawee Street. 

In addition to a box-style concert venue that would hold 1,400 seats or 2,000 standing concertgoers, it will also be the permanent home of the Lansing Public Media Center, and, possibly, All of the Above Hip-Hop Academy and the Lansing Art Gallery. 

Cochran said the participation of the latter two organizations is a key variable.  

“They have to make a massive decision about a permanent home,” he said. 

Terms with both organizations would depend on whether they have the “ability or appetite” to raise a large amount of money up front and get a low lease rate “because they helped build it,” Cochran said. 

“At the other extreme, if they brought nothing to the table up front, it would be a higher lease rate,” he said. “The reality is probably somewhere in the middle.” 

Several ownership models are on the table, including public ownership (by the city of Lansing), private ownership (by the developer, Lansing-based Dymaxion Development,) a mix of the two, or an outside-the-box model such as a community land trust that would allow nonprofits like the Lansing Art Gallery to be equity partners. 

Cochran said that since the city will be the largest single contributor to the center, it would have a predominant position on the governing board. 

The center “could be owned by the developer and everybody leases space.” 

Jeff Deehan of Dymaxion Development said he’s “wide open” to any ownership model. 

“We’re happy to act as the developer, or to sponsor any element of the project that’s required, or even to own,” Deehan said.  

The facility is expected to cost from $10 million to $20 million, depending largely on whether 40 apartments are included in the final design. Cochran said that an intermediate version proposed in February, in which the apartment shells are not fully built, has been ruled out. 

The city has already secured the $10 million it needs to get the project underway: $2 million in state funding and an additional $8 million from the media center in upfront revenue expected from the bonding of public, educational and government access (PEG) fees. 

The apartments make the project more expensive, but Cochran said they will bring in long-term revenue, activate the block and bring other benefits to the project that make it worth the investment. 

“Besides, we could just go to a bank and get a bank loan for that part of it,” he said.  

But if enough private money is raised, on top of the PEG money and state funds already secured, the project could go forward without incurring debt, which Cochran called an “ideal” outcome. 

When the ownership and management structure is established, Capitol Fundraising Associates will kick a search for private donors into overdrive. 

A financial consultant has identified $3 million to $5 million in potential private donations for the facility. 

The Lansing project team is comparing notes with the staff of Old Forester’s Paristown Hall. The box-style hall opened in July 2019, holds about 2,000 standing concert-goers and bills itself as “a performing arts facility with the energy of a nightclub.” 

“The design of the building is similar, in terms of it not being a traditional concert hall with sloped floor seating, and the budget is similar,” Cochran said. “They’re helping us with how they approach private and corporate fund donors with those sponsorship and naming opportunities.” 

Another thing that is still up in the air is the Lansing venue’s name. Cochran said the project team is open to any suggestions, including naming the facility after Lansing attorney, arts patron and civic leader Jack Davis, who died in 2020, without seeing the long-held dream of a performing arts center in Lansing come to fruition. 

Cochran admired Davis’ pragmatic embrace of the current performing arts center model when a more expensive project that would have housed the Lansing Symphony Orchestra collapsed in 2020. 

“He saw the writing on the wall, like we all did, that we wouldn’t be able to build that $60 million thing we all would have loved to build,” Cochran said. “But he was like, ‘Hey, they’re telling us this market needs a flat floor rock and roll venue. Maybe that’s what we should build.’ I consider him a colleague and a friend. All of those options are going to be discussed. It’s just not the time yet.”