MANISTEE--“For the last nine years since we’ve been doing this, we have ended up in negative numbers seven out of the nine years,” said Ramsdell Regional Center for the Arts board president Nancy Ferguson.
The RRCA in Manistee is asking city council to help with tens of thousands of dollars in expenses.
For more than 100-years the Ramsdell Theatre has been a fixture in Manistee where talented artists like James Earl Jones have graced the stage and honed their craft.
But now the theatre could be in jeopardy.
Break a leg is traditionally what they say in theatre before an actor hits the stage, but the Ramsdell Regional Arts Center is singing a different tune in 2025, they say break the bank is more like it.
“Over the course of the years that we’ve been here, we’ve been able to invest more than $350,000 in the improvement of the facility. From redoing rooms to make them more functional, to completely overhauling the light and sound system in the theatre,” said Ferguson.
The list of repairs goes on, ranging from rebuilt trap doors on the stage, to front door repairs of the theatre so the doors can actually lock and close.
With a building that’s more than a century old, maintenance and utility costs are endless.
“The cost of utilities and maintenance to run this building for the year 2021/2022 was $81, 000. For 2023 it was almost $90,000,” said Ferguson. “We had a good year last year, there was a mild winter, so our total bill was $63,000, that was great. This year our budget is $72,000 and we’ve already broken through that on repairs.”
It doesn’t end there, right now the building is in need of multiple repairs that the RRCA can’t afford.
“There are several things in the not so fun part of the building that need repairs: air handling, air conditioning, heat unit repairs. There are so many of them, they were all put in place in 2000 and 2004 when the building was restored. We’re being hit with a $4,000 bill here, a $3,000 bill there and another $7,000 dollar bill,” said Ferguson.
Last Tuesday the RRCA pled their case to the city council to go back to paying for the operations cost and maintenance fees, something the city previously paid for before RRCA signed an agreement stating they would assume the financial responsibility for those cost. Here’s what they want from the city.
“We engaged with the city to reopen our lease, our first proposal that we offered was that they would takeover, they would go back to doing what they’ve done for years, to be responsible for the systems structure of the building,” said Ferguson.
And if the city doesn’t comply, the Ramsdell may not be able to continue on as the community knows it.