New Haven Independent

Posted by: jeffreykerekes | April 30, 2008 8:31 AM

The Shubert did an outstanding job of turning people out to support its funding. Many of the presentations seemed as if people were talking about closing the theater. I have heard no calls to close the theater. The $6 per ticket number would actually be less when attendance goes up. The more people that use the theater, the lower the amount you would need to charge per person to cover the $410,000. It is my understanding that the Wilco concert sold out nearly moments after going on sale. Perhaps a few more such concerts would balance their budget. The Shubert is closed during the summer. Perhaps having some concerts in the summer to increase revenues and attendance. The $6 number is based on 2006 attendance. $410,000/67,000 tickets (in 2006) equals $6.12. However, in the testimony last night, they said over 100,000 people attended shows. This is is $4.10/person. The Shubert also had an additional 26,000 patrons served when the facility was rented. If you divide $410,000/(67000+26000)=$4.40/person. If they indeed served 100K and we assume the same 26000 in rental attendance, its only $3.25/person. At a time when the city is hurting so badly financially, I believe it is our job to look where we can save money with the least amount of pain to all involved. I suggest $3.25/person is much less painful than layoffs.

Check out our projections on where taxes are headed at our website www.nhcan.org.

Posted by: cedarhillresident | April 30, 2008 9:34 AM

I agree with Jeffery. As I sat there and listened to all the testimony, person after person talked about it as if the Theater was going to be shut down. Not one person in New Haven wants that to happen. The suggestion that the subsidy should be fazed out and or cut is what the subject was. I understand the want and need for the money.....and I understand the need to not allow the Shubert to go under.

As I sat there watching the nights event....airport and Shubert testimony, there seemed to be one very important thing lost in last nights hearing.(Maybe it was a sidetrack to do just that). We NEED to start cutting the budget! Yes we are in Hartford trying to get Pilot money and that is a good thing. But not something that we as a city can count on in the future. I realize that the development in New Haven is in an upward stage, which is a good thing but it will be a decade or two before the tax payers will see relief in that.
We need to talk about the here and now! The state of the Nation and where New Haven wants to be during this period. Do we want to walk away with the reputation of just another city hit by the recession? or do we want to walk away as the city that was strong enough to survive a recession?

Cuts need to be made! At the debate last week the panel agree that the committee had little control over the BOE spending.... well if you have little control over the one place we can make some big cut then the committee needs to go as a group to who ever can make those cuts and pressure them. This is the bigger picture...our reputation as a strong city! The burdens of the homeowners needs to be lifteed..(even if it is just a little) we need to be a city that cares about everyone. Not just the buissness and the homless not just Yale and the wealther. We need to be a city that care about the forgotten middle class the people that are shouldering the cost.

Posted by: Gary Doyens | April 30, 2008 10:43 AM

The Shubert performance last night was masterful -it had all the elements of a good story - villans, heroins and fantasy. The villans were those of us who would dare suggest the Shubert dependency payment be retired; the heroin was the Shubert who provides some free tickets to nono-profits and the fantasy was that the Shubert was in danger of dying - of going back to 1976 - as a shuttered, aging old lady expiring before our very eyes. Oh, the drama of it all gave me goose bumps and sore rump. Between Tweed and the Shubert - dependency boosters talked for more than three hours.

The reality is not one person has ever suggested the Shubert should close. Raising the cost of tickets by a couple of dollars and pressuring your development staff to generate more dollars is a perfectly acceptable way of bridging a budget gap.

As was pointed out long after all the Shubert and Tweed boosters retired safely to their homes last night, was the fact that both dependency payments account for less than one quarter of one percent of the overall city budget. Yet, more than three hours was spent discussing it as if the entire life of the city were hanging in the balance.

The City of New Haven has a petina of solvency. It is living paycheck to paycheck. It is a half billion in general debt; is carrying more than a half billion in unfunded liabilities and has blown through its budget every year for the last four years, only able to balance it with gimmicks and last minute checks from Yale. It is currently begging for more dependency payments from the state because the DeStefano Administration refuses to cut spending by laying off employees, limiting overtime, curbing benefits or consolidating city departments.

According to budget projections by NH CAN, doing nothing and maintaining the status quo will cause a property tax increase of some 70% across the next five years or so. The city must save where it can including the Shubert and Tweed and begin to revise compensation plans for city employees including a very rich benefit package that costs 55% of their cash take.

Putting on a great performance is terrific theater - it would be nice if some of these boosters would look at the rest of the budget too.

Posted by: Walt | April 30, 2008 11:26 AM

If Richter's and Claire's and others profit from the Shubert, let them come up with the needed money, together with the arts fanatics like the Clarks, Tylers , Trowbridgea Hookers etc.

Why should the New Haven or State taxpayer who may never enter the Shubert pay for their entertainment.

Don't want to pay another #6. Tough. Stay home

As to free tickets handed out, it costs Shubert just about nothing, but they want $400,000 from the taxpayer suckers.

Pay your own way, arts lovers..

Posted by: Your Tax Dollars at Work | April 30, 2008 11:33 AM

In the early eighties, when the contemporary Shubert subsidy was initiated, downtown New Haven was an entirely different place. The Shubert was an old barn sitting right in the middle of a devastated downtown. Downtown really needed that project. And it got copious federal tax credits and other subsidies to get started.

The City subsidy originated, I believe, to provide interest to pay off a mortgage taken by the developers in order to complete the project. That mortgage has been paid off. The City, like a doting parent, fearful of letting her child go out into the real world, still provides the now needless subsidies.

As anyone who takes a look around can notice, things have changed! New Haven has better places to deploy its taxpayers' hard-earned money!

Posted by: robn | April 30, 2008 11:39 AM

I wanted to go to the Wilco show that everybody keeps metioning and was very dissapointed that they sold out so quickly. I was doubly dissapointed when a friend told me he walked up to the box office on the day of the show and somehow got a ticket. The point I'm trying to make is that maybe the theater management isn't quite as sharp as we would like them to be. Maybe if they did a blitzkrieg on scalpers to avoid overinflated prices, they could attain more control of their venue and do better pre-sells tahat cut out middle men are are to the advandtage of their customers.

Posted by: pedro | April 30, 2008 1:30 PM

The shubert would be PERFECT for more concerts. Take a look at the historic Calvin theater in Northampton MA. Their current schedule includes KT Tunstall, George Carlin, The Black Crowes.
How are these people not playing in New Haven???

http://www.iheg.com/calvin_theater_main.asp

I guarantee that the Shubert could regularly get acts like this and fill the facility to a decent amount. Many other cities have done this.

If the Shubert is going to get the subsidy this year, then so be it. HOWEVER, what if the city included a stipulation in this year's budget that the subsidy would decline over the next 5-7 years to zero, and that the Shubert would be mandated to increase attendance to the theater?

Going back to the lack of musical perfomances other than Toads place, it would be great if someone stepped up to the plate in New Haven to bring more acts to town. We are smack between NYC, Boston, and Providence and would be an easy stop for tours. On a related note, does anyone know what is happening with the Palace theater?

Posted by: cedarhillresident | April 30, 2008 3:08 PM

Pedro I agree... that is one thing we are really missing in New Haven. We do have Toads which is fun but that is a limited venue (younger crowd). If we can get some decent shows that would bring in some revenue. If done right it can bring in a good crowd and alot more traffic in the downtown area.

Posted by: In The Hood | April 30, 2008 6:14 PM

Gary, you make good points albeit way too long. Where should the personnel take place and what are the downside of these cuts? I can see the city saving money but at what cost? What spending cuts you would like to see and what are the downside to those?

Posted by: Ned | April 30, 2008 8:52 PM

It was nearly impossible to hear the members of the BOA, present at the meeting, except when Yusuf Shaw, got a bit testy when a citizen said that "we can't hear". Does Robert's Rules of Order cover requests for the public's business to be audible? (in fairness, the "audience" was invited to move closer, but which is more disruptive: a hundred people moving their seats, or eight people speaking clearly and loudly?) The "audience" was then treated to a glib(?) comment about how the BOA would need a few hundred thousand dollars to get a functioning sound system (har, har, har) - you know, so that the suckers, aka, taxpayers could hear the BOA members... I did hear testimony about how a successful business needs public money to maintain profits - seems that's what business is all about these days - public subsidies - Wall St. or College St. - same story... Also, a young woman from the city of West Haven (threatened with state oversight for blowing its own tax revenue), i.e., not a New Haven taxpayer, is dependent on New Haven taxpayers to provide her with employment. Oh yes, and we mustn't forget about "the children". Are children the last refuge of scoundrels, or what? Here's a suggestion to keep "the children" busy - send them on a trip.

Posted by: Gary Doyens | April 30, 2008 10:25 PM

In the Hood:

1. Eliminate Fair Rent Commission
2. Hiring freeze in non-essential jobs. position increases in the police and fire are not essential.
3. Freeze Travel outside state.
4. No more personal cars for city executives.
5. Minus outside funding, end city ID program.
6. Cap Police overtime at $4 million - it now exceeds $6 million. When you've got that much overtime, the department simply is not being managed properly.
7. End the practice of accruing pension benefits for cop overtime paid by outside contractors.
8. Require all union contracts to have the exact same benefit package so they can be bundled and bid accordingly.
9. Seriously investigate whether the insurance pool offered by Nancy Wyman's office will provide savings to City of New Haven employee health - Wyman believes it could save millions.
10. Cut $250K from LCI. Shrink responsibility.
11. Cut the Tweed Subsidy - $800K - funds could be replaced by user fees and higher g.a. fees.
12. Begin four year phase out of subsidy at Shubert.
13. Trim the benefit package provided to city employees so it doesn't exceed 35 - 40% of salary.
14. Cut $3 million from the BOE - with focus on employees earning in excess of $100K; eliminate special assignment teachers unless tied to specific programs or classroom work directly tied to student learning or improving the achievement gap.
15. If any more schools are built, focus should be on meeting needs of students, not wants and should certainly reign in the architectual dreamers that give us monuments we can't afford.
16. Consolidate senior centers into one or two full service centers - eliminate rest of them and their employees.
17. End city id program unless it has outside funding. If you still offer it, do it through the libraries where we already have employees. Eliminate jobs of existing id employees.

This is just a beginning - There are no significant downsides.

Posted by: In the Hood | May 1, 2008 2:48 PM

Thanks Gary!

Posted by: Chris Gray | May 2, 2008 1:47 AM

Don't get me wrong. I love the Shubert. It was what first brought my parents to New Haven, for the first try out of "My Fair Lady", courtesy of my millionaire uncle. (The costumes hadn't even arrived.) I saw my first professional theater there, "The Fantastics". I got my own first Actor's Equity contract as a dead body (along with the late Ben DiLeto, one night) in "Arsenic and Old Lace".

Still, back in '85 I made my first television singing appearance on WTNH News with the Green Party rewrite of "What Do Simple Folk Do?" outside of "Camelot", the inaugural show of the new era. Even then, I agreed with Walt's point that the area businesses which profit from and the patrons who enjoy the offerings are the ones who should subsidize the wonderful treasure in which they share.

The dog and pony show described above does a disservice to the citizens of our city who are only holding onto their lives by their fingernails and can ill-afford to subsidize such economically discriminating entertainment.

Simple folk get their entertainment on the Green, or use to.

Posted by: concerned citizen | May 12, 2008 10:07 AM

Shubert makes plenty of money and wastes a lot of money they are riddled with nepotism, they just like
any organzation should tighten their belt and get rid of the waste. and if they would like to cut off their nose to spite their face let em try it! That stage union that they have is costing them dearly those guys make so much money they only work 9 months out of the year they are riddled with waste ask em how much money they make off a show before and after it starts. tell the director to start booking plays that have a greater return just like any other concert organizer would do!