AUBURN — If approved by voters in June, a 1,200-seat performing arts center — doubling as a professional state-of-the-art city venue — will welcome guests to a new Edward Little High School in the fall of 2023.

Harriman architect Lisa Sawin goes over the proposed design and costs of the new school Tuesday night with the Building Committee. Sun Journal photo by Bonnie Washuk

The $5.5 million auditorium, complete with a professional stage, catwalk, dressing rooms, lighting and sound, is included in the roughly $15 million in local costs for the state-record $125 million project.

That plan will move forward if it receives an informal go-ahead from both the City Council on Monday and a community-wide straw poll Wednesday.

School officials, taking a cue from past projects, are banking on the auditorium swelling with school events and rentals from outside organizations, which in other districts have made performing arts centers money-makers.

However, during the public process in designing the new high school, some parents and residents questioned whether the community could sustain an auditorium of that size, and whether there would be enough interest from outside organizations to host events there to make it profitable.

“(I) do not believe this size will lead to (a) self-sustained situation,” a resident responded on a recent School Department questionnaire about the plans.

Another said, “Portland/Westbrook might be able to make money, but this is Lewiston/Auburn.”

A COMMUNITY DRAW  

School officials and architect Harriman have looked elsewhere in the state to see what has worked, and they are confident the venue would thrive in Auburn. They say a venue of this size would fill a gap that exists in the entire region, and one that could attract popular musicians and more significant productions.

The next-largest auditorium, at 800 seats, is at Lewiston Middle School. Then there’s the Gendron Franco Center in Lewiston, with a capacity of 423. The Community Little Theatre in Auburn and The Public Theatre in Lewiston hold 385 and 315, respectively.

The Building Committee and its performing arts subcommittee pitched the idea of 1,200 seats based on holding school functions in a space large enough to fit the student body and staff. But beyond that, Bill Buzza, the Edward Little band director and a building committee member, said, “Given our geographic location, we believe it will be a very attractive facility for many various groups.”

Mark Lee, an architect for Harriman, said last week that part of the consideration for an auditorium of this size — it would be the third-largest in the state — was that it could allow Auburn to “bring acts on the larger end that potentially wouldn’t come if we didn’t have something of this scale.”

Superintendent Katy Grondin said no official market analysis was done to study the potential use and revenue for the auditorium. But, she said, experts in the region have been positive that the auditorium would generate new programming.

“It’s a great opportunity to draw people to our community,” she said. “In the past, we’ve had to turn away things because we don’t have a big enough venue. Our local venues can’t support something large, and you either have to go to Bangor or down to Portland. We expect to be drawing from central Maine, as well as southern and northern.”

A big piece of Auburn’s positive outlook on such a large venue comes from Westbrook, which opened its 1,000-seat performing arts center in 2010.

At this point, Westbrook is viewed as a success story and as one of the trend-setting communities that opted to build a professional-style venue at a school. The Westbrook Performing Arts Center at Westbrook Middle School hosts between 85 and 100 events annually, and what’s made it successful, at least in the eyes of taxpayers and city officials, is that almost half of the events take in rental revenue.

Last year, it brought in $124,969 in revenue and had $107,391 in expenses.

Jamie Grant, who has been the Westbrook Performing Arts Center director since it opened, said the biggest challenge in getting momentum at the venue was marketing. People simply didn’t know about it, and at the time, there weren’t many examples of professional venues being run out of schools. It took until year three to start realizing its revenue potential.

“For outside renters, you don’t have a history for them to look back on,” he said. “If you’re booking a concert, for example, you don’t have a history of booking a similar act and how that did. That’s a bit of a leap of faith for those renters to take with you.”

But, he said, that’s why a marketing position is crucial.

“The venue itself has to have a good sense of the community,” he said, while being able to market to a wide swath of potential renters.

Westbrook now hosts ballet performances, dance recitals, plays, concerts, bodybuilding competitions, beauty pageants, operas, lectures and graduations, among other things.

Grant said now that Westbrook has some momentum, the most important part of his job is consistency and retention — getting customers who had a great experience to come back the next year.

“The more of those you can pile up, that gives you a really solid foundation to build on,” he said.

Auburn likely will use Westbrook’s design as a model. Harriman designed the Westbrook Performing Arts Center.

Architect Lee said there is no official concept design for the auditorium because the community has not yet given a signal of approval. Auburn voters will decide in a June 11 referendum.

A rendering of the school auditorium by Lavallee Brensinger Architects. Lavallee Brensinger Architects

PROFESSIONAL VENUE

In Sanford, the brand-new Sanford Performing Arts Center hosted its first-ever performance in December.

The 854-seat venue is part of the new Sanford High School and Regional Technical Center, which came with a $100 million price tag, the most expensive ever built in the state. Most of the project was funded by the state, with Sanford taxpayers contributing about $10.6 million.

According to Superintendent Matt Nelson, the department hired a director for the new auditorium in January 2018 “to get everything set up and ready so we could hit the ground running.” Unfortunately, he said, there were significant construction delays, and the center did not open until December of that year.

“The contractor has continued finishing the PAC and we’ve had some events to date, but with a limited scope. Therefore, we had no revenue projections to date,” he said.

The Sanford center, like Auburn’s proposal, is outfitted with the latest lighting, sound and projection technology.

Buzza, the Auburn Building Committee member, said he visited Sanford in February and was told that between Feb. 1 and the end of the school year, 56 school and community events are planned. Forty-four of the events are school functions, which do not provide revenue.

Brett Williams, the Sanford director, told Auburn officials, “We will have many more rentals and presentations next year when we feel comfortable with the technical systems in the room and work the bugs out.”

In Auburn, Buzza compiled a list of school events that are held each year, many of which the district pays to host elsewhere because the school lacks adequate space. As of now, the list includes 39 school functions, but through speaking with other districts, Buzza has another list of non-school possibilities that could be hosted in Auburn.

He said those include various dance studios in need of performance space for recitals.

Staff Photo by Shawn Patrick Ouellette: The Westbrook Performing Arts Center on Thursday, July 26, 2012. Shawn Patrick Ouellette

Through his involvement in the Maine Music Educators Association, he said, “I know that there is a strong interest for us to host various music festivals, as most schools in the region are not large enough to host these festivals.”

In the past decade, including a performing arts center and community venue in a new school construction project has been popular. But having a professional quality theater usually falls on the local municipality to pick up the cost.

Lee said the Maine Department of Education, which pays for new school facilities, has become “increasingly conservative” in how it funds auditoriums. Its formula would have paid for an auditorium that would have held one-third of the city’s high school enrollment, estimated at 1,110.

He said, increasingly, architects are seeing that schools are “desiring more sophisticated auditoriums, with professional-quality systems.”

The Maine Department of Education pays for new school facilities and establishes both size and financial limits on projects using a formula based on school population. That often leaves a school district to decide how far beyond the basic elements it wants to go, and how much is too much for local taxpayers to fund.

Also on the wish list in Auburn is a state-of-the-art athletic complex, air conditioning throughout, geothermal heating and extra classroom and parking space.

Originally, the local proposed cost was about $23 million, but has since been whittled down to roughly $15 million after a series of workshops with the City Council, whose members had reservations over the potential impact on taxpayers.

It’s unclear whether Auburn will follow Westbrook and Sanford and hire a director position to oversee the new auditorium. According to Grondin, the School Department will work with city officials to decide “how to best support” the center, and it could be a shared position.

She said once the project is official, Auburn’s fine arts department could begin discussions with organizations interested in renting the space, and could possibly collaborate with Marc Gosselin, the city’s director of Recreation and Sports Tourism, a relatively new position.

“As we start to book, hopefully we can look at if there’s a way to support a position,” Grondin said.

Buzza said in an email that, “through our research, it has become clear that the role of ‘marketing’ the auditorium will be one of the responsibilities of an auditorium manager we have discussed hiring.”

Peter Lancia, the superintendent in Westbrook, said a performing arts center takes time to establish and to turn a profit.

“Patience is important,” he said. “Also, having a full-time director is essential in both managing and marketing the center.”

arice@sunjournal.com