Our View

Congratulations to Mary Bensel, executive director of the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall; Sarasota City Manager Tom Barwin; former City Manager Bob Bartolotta; and the Van Wezel Foundation.

Thanks to their efforts, over the past two years and this current fiscal year, city taxpayers have not had to subsidize the cost of operating the city’s performing arts hall.

That’s quite an accomplishment. It’s rare among municipalities around the nation to find such public venues supporting themselves. Just up the interstate, for instance, Mahaffey Theater in St. Petersburg requires $500,000 to $600,000 a year from the city’s general funds; and in Tampa, the Straz Center taps city taxpayers for about $550,000 and Hillsborough County taxpayers for another $740,000 a year.

But as with most things in life, the Van Wezel’s financial achievement is a choice. Avoiding the subsidy comes at a price.

The Van Wezel business model is to book more than 100 shows a year with entertainers from around the world. The idea is simple: butts in seats, for a price. And do it on the days people are most likely to attend — the weekends.

Indeed, the Van Wezel model translates into higher usage fees for weekend days and nights than what is charged during the week.

In one respect, it’s working. Ticket sales and parking fees generate 80% of the Van Wezel’s revenues. Contrast that with only 54% and 43% of revenues coming from ticket sales and parking at the Mahaffey and Straz, respectively.

The booking of so many outside shows and the mission to operate with surpluses, however, have produced negative effects. Prime performance dates are severely limited to local performing arts organizations, in particular Sarasota Ballet and the Sarasota Orchestra. And the rental costs in general are so high that the cost-per-show makes the Van Wezel all but unaffordable to the homegrown organizations.

It’s an irony: The Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall is a symbol of Sarasota’s reputation as the cultural-arts center of Florida. But the city-based groups rarely use it.

To a great extent, this results in a lost economic opportunity. Consider:

As result of not being able to afford the Van Wezel and perform there on prime snowbird-season dates, Sarasota Ballet and the Sarasota Orchestra perform in venues with fewer seats — at the Asolo and Holley Hall.

This produces lost opportunities, not just for these organizations but for Sarasota as well.

For one, the smaller venues limit the organizations’ revenues and raise their cost of production, making them weaker financially than they otherwise might be. What’s more, by not performing regularly in the hometown performing arts hall, the city is losing out on attracting more and bigger export revenue.

Van Wezel’s Bensel will say its shows of outside entertainers help boost Sarasota’s cultural reputation. But the fact is most of the shows that travel here can be seen elsewhere. The ticket money local residents pay covers the Van Wezel’s costs, but some of it also leaves Sarasota.

In contrast, the local performing arts groups are like selling the beaches to tourists or, say, Sun Hydraulics selling its hydraulic valves overseas — exports that bring in outside revenues and increase the wealth of Sarasota.

With their growing national and international reputations, the Sarasota Ballet and Sarasota Orchestra are businesses that should be fostered to continue growing. But that growth will continue to be strained if their futures remain tied to performing at the Asolo and Holley Hall. If they have bigger, better permanent venues and available at the prime times, they can enhance the overall economic and cultural vitality of the region.

We hope this point is not lost in the future development of the bayfront.

Yes, kudos to those who have turned the Van Wezel from a tax burden to a self-supporting venue. But to keep the Van Wezel operating as it is — as a public facility reliant on out-of-town entertainers and out of reach for our own homegrown performers — seems to be somewhat of a backward proposition.

To be sure, taxpayers don’t want the Van Wezel to go back to requiring subsidies. But if the local performing arts organizations are to grow financially and in reputation, they need bigger, better permanent venues.

And that is why, as the organizers of Bayfront 20-20 and city commissioners move toward redeveloping the bayfront, their thinking should embrace mixed-use development on the Van Wezel site — a performing arts venue that can accommodate and is affordable for the hometown teams and commercial development that would eliminate a need for taxpayer subsidies for the performing arts hall.

+ Gillespie park continued
When you purchase property, e.g. land and a home on it, you have certain expectations with that ownership: It’s your property; therefore, you are the steward of it, and it’s in your interest to maintain and improve the property to the highest degree affordable.

Likewise, you also have an interest in protecting your property. For instance, you would object and resist any non-owner of your property damaging, misusing, destroying or congregating on your property without your permission. No one has the right to do any of that.

Conversely, property ownership brings certain expectations of you, the owner, as well. The most commonly accepted expectation is that “the law” forbids you from damaging or causing harm to your neighbors and their property. You can’t operate a pig farm in a residential neighborhood. Or you can’t manufacture steel. Or pollute the environment with toxic waste.

Now go one step further: As a property owner, when you pay property taxes, those taxes are presumed to purchase for you your share of such services as police and fire protection, garbage collection and maintenance and operation of the neighborhood park, among other services. Because you pay for these services, you expect to be entitled to them fairly.

Now comes a group of vagrants in your neighborhood, as they have at Gillespie Park. They do not own property; they sleep on the streets; they do not pay property taxes.

Are they entitled to the use of your neighborhood park?

This is the dilemma that arises with anything dubbed “public.” When everyone owns property, no one owns it. When no one owns it, typically it is abused.

This is why private ownership virtually always leads to better stewardship.

But what of the homeless? What about parks for them?

Philanthropy. Americans are the most generous, philanthropic people in the world. You can be sure that if there were no parks for the homeless, philanthropists would fund them.

WHY WE HAVE THE MORAL RIGHT, DUTY TO OBLITERATE JIHADISTS
From Craig Biddle, editor of The Objective Standard, Oct. 9:

Leon Panetta, former director of the CIA and secretary of defense, says that defeating our enemies in the Middle East and North Africa “is going to take a long time.” How long? “I think we’re looking at kind of a 30-year war,” Panetta predicts.

Whether the United States will be involved in this war for 30 years is an open question. But the notion that such a lengthy war is necessary is nonsense.

America has astoundingly sophisticated weaponry — combat drones, nuclear submarines, satellite surveillance, aircraft carriers, stealth bombers, GPS-guided missiles, bunker busters, thermobaric bombs and so on. We have the most intelligent, best trained, most competent soldiers and special operations forces on the planet. We can eliminate large cities in a matter of seconds. We can take over large countries in a matter of weeks, if not days. We can bring any enemy to its knees in short order — if we so choose.

So why accept a 30-year war? Why accept even a 30-week war?

The only reason Americans will accept a long war is that they have lost (or never gained) confidence in their right to defend themselves against those who seek to kill them. If we are to defeat this God-awful enemy and return to normal, jihad-free living in a reasonable amount of time, Americans must regain confidence in the fact that we have certain rights and that our government must use the full capacity of our military to protect these rights when foreign aggressors aim to violate them.

We have a moral right to live our lives free from “Allah’s will” or any such nonsense. We have a moral right to defend ourselves against those who have faith or “just know” that they should convert or kill us. We have a moral right to kill those who seek to kill us. In short, we have a moral right to life, liberty and self-defense.

Of course, few Americans would deny that we have such rights. Most would say we do. The problem is that saying we have these rights is not the same thing as knowing we have them. And knowing we have these rights is a precondition of confidently demanding that our government protect them …

… Americans who lack sufficient motivation to do the mental work necessary to grasp the source and nature of rights may find such motivation by looking at the things and people they love and by seriously considering what it would be like to lose them.

Look, for instance, at your life, your career, your goals, your (relative) freedom, your boyfriend or girlfriend, your husband or wife, your children or grandchildren. Are you willing to permit jihadists who are dead set on destroying your values and killing your loved ones (or worse) to continue their efforts toward that end?

These values are precisely what is at stake. These are the things and people we stand to lose so long as the U.S. government fails to end the jihadist assault. And the only way to get the government to end the assault as quickly as possible is to remind the government and all Americans who will listen that the government is legally required to protect our rights — moral rights we can prove we have. It’s that simple.

What’s terrifying is not that a man with Panetta’s political history and visibility says a 30-year war is necessary. What’s terrifying is that almost no Americans are properly challenging such assertions. Let’s change that.