Anchorage owns an aging arts center, and repairs keep outpacing the budget

Anchorage owns a 30-year-old performing arts center downtown, and it is falling behind on the building's upkeep. On Tuesday the Assembly takes up the latest bill: a heating repair that has already run well over budget.

The Alaska Center for the Performing Arts belongs to the municipality, but the city has never run it. Since the building opened in 1988, a private nonprofit, Alaska Center for the Performing Arts, Inc., has operated it under a management agreement, and part of that deal sets aside 10% of the building's revenue for capital repairs. That reserve is where much of the current repair money is coming from, and it is not keeping pace with what the aging building needs.

The item in front of the Assembly is the heating system, where the antifreeze that circulates through the building's heating loop is being replaced. The Assembly budgeted $200,000 for it in May. The low bid came in around $263,000, and the full cost with related work is higher, so the administration wants to add $141,330, raising the total to $341,330, about 71 percent over the original figure.

The heating loop is not the only system failing. The same request sets aside money to plan replacements for the electric cabling that keeps ice off the gutters and for the deteriorating boiler stack.

The operator has said the strain is real. In a letter to the community last year, the nonprofit wrote that it "has been unable to secure funding necessary to maintain the building," with deferred repairs "threatening not only the building's future, but all the organizations that call it home." It paused its Broadway Alaska season, canceling a scheduled run of Disney's "The Lion King," and cited infrastructure and safety needs among the reasons. Its website lists no season for the coming year.

The repairs also raise a question about the arrangement itself. The city owns the building but has left its operation, and much of its repair funding, to a nonprofit for nearly four decades, and the revenue-share reserve meant to cover upkeep is falling short. Tuesday's vote keeps the heating project moving. It leaves unanswered who is responsible for keeping a public building standing over the long run.

The item is on Tuesday's consent agenda, the routine measures the Assembly approves together.