CITY NEEDS TO TAKE CLOSE LOOK AT COMBO

In one of his final official acts before pleading guilty to two felony counts of misusing a city-issued credit card, Councilman Uvaldo Martinez last week ordered the city manager to form a task force to propose operating guidelines for COMBO.

Martinez’s action came after the city manager had proposed enforcing a policy against double-dipping by members of COMBO, which for 22 years has functioned as the city’s umbrella organization redistributing city funds to the arts groups that meet its membership requirements.

Recently, questions have been raised about how efficiently the Combined Arts and Education Council, a private organization, has been run. COMBO’s overhead costs were 52% of its non-government revenues, according to a recent fiscal-year audit. Martinez, who also proposed a managerial audit for COMBO, wants to ensure that the city money it grants is “equitable and that it is well-managed,” a spokesman for Martinez said.

Martinez’s task force may have too narrow a focus. Despite years of discussion in the formulation of the city’s master arts plan, no one has taken a good hard look at the city government’s relationship with the arts. The master arts plan, which is still pending, is severely flawed in its scope. The plan is curiously silent with respect to major arts organizations, all but two of which are COMBO members. This year the city will give 40% of its arts budget to COMBO organizations. Such support of the arts is ignored by what should be an all-inclusive arts plan.

The Martinez task force should study not just the matter of an umbrella organization, but also should broaden its scope to evaluate the state of the arts in San Diego. Los Angeles commissioned a task force on the arts in March after a city councilman proposed creating a city endowment for the arts. A volunteer task force of 46 prominent leaders in the arts surveyed other cities on local government support for the arts and will report back to the L.A. City Council in December.

The same need for endowments applies in San Diego. Most of this city’s major arts organizations are at a critical mass in terms of contributed income. Although San Diegans are incredibly generous, the support that major arts institutions require to survive is already at unprecedented heights and is bound to stretch that generosity. In the process it’s conceivable that the smaller groups could be squeezed out unless pressure on the large organizations is relieved. That’s where endowments come in.

Conventional wisdom holds that a multimillion-dollar arts organization should have an endowment approximately double its operating budget. The interest income from the endowment should be sufficient, when combined with its other fund-raising efforts, to balance its budget. Only one major San Diego arts institution--the San Diego Museum of Art--has an endowment of any size.

Given the city’s fund-raising limitations--no major corporate headquarters, no major foundations that support the arts--it’s not surprising that all of the bigger arts groups--from the symphony to the Old Globe--are talking about endowments. The city, perhaps in collaboration with the San Diego Community Foundation, could do a major service by setting up a task force to study current and future arts needs.

BALBOA QUESTIONS: Remember the Balboa Theater, the historic theater at 4th Avenue and E Street that was the center of a controversy for a year and a half? Backers of the San Diego Art Center wanted to convert the theater to a modern art museum. Theater enthusiasts and preservationists, who wanted to preserve the site for the performing arts, were outraged when the Art Center people received an exclusive bargaining agreement with the city. Then the Art Center folded, due to heavy debts.

Center City Development Corp., which oversees the Balboa for the city, is waiting for a survey of downtown theaters to be completed before it will make any decisions on the Balboa.

There are two main alternatives, according to CCDC Executive Vice President Gerald Trimble. “It’s either going to be an arts center or used as a theater,” Trimble said. Asked recently about the possibility of the structure being torn down, Trimble said: “I don’t think anybody is going to bite the bullet and tear it down. There’s too much emotion involved. People would rather have it just sit, until somebody comes forward to do something.”

GALAS AT GLOBE: Three performances of the surrealistic “Baby Redboots’ Revenge,” by the late San Diego playwright Philip-Dimitri Galas, will be presented at 8 p.m. Oct. 16-17 at the Old Globe Theatre.

Sean Sullivan, who won two awards in Los Angeles for his performances in the one-man play, will portray Baby 4-Strings, a former child star bass fiddle player, relegated to playing in a polka band. The comic monologue takes on an intense, ranting, stream-of-consciousness form. Galas died this summer. A share of the $10 tickets ($8 for students, seniors and military) will go toward a fund for young actors in Galas’ name.

ARTBEATS: Last month the City Council paused to honor a local artist and named a theater in her honor. Based on the recommendation of the Balboa Park Committee, the City Council passed a resolution changing the name of the Balboa Park Puppet Theatre to the Marie Hitchcock Puppet Theatre. . . . The Border Art Workshop will hold “Cafe Urgente: A Social Dialogue on Contemporary Border Consciousness” at 7 p.m. Oct. 16 at the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park. In a public discussion with artists, six scholars will present their views on the redefinition of border society.