If Mark Nerenhausen left his posts with the AT&T Performing Arts Center because of mounting financial pressures, he didn’t betray it in an interview with D CEO magazine late last month. We’d called Nerenhausen because an excellent source told us he’d received a weekend “emergency” call from PAC fundraisers saying they needed to scare up $8 million–and fast. Nerenhausen told D CEO that no such emergency calls had gone out from the AT&T center, and that our source must have confused the PAC with some other nonprofit group.
He also said the center was in decent shape with its $25 million first-year operating budget, that it was in the midst only of a “normal,” end-of-fiscal-year campaign to raise $1 million for that budget–and was already 74 percent of the way there. “We’re tracking very well against our budget,” he said, “and we will improve over time.” While the economic climate remained challenging–indeed, fundraising for the center’s $30 million remaining “capital campaign” has slowed to a trickle–the center was holding its own and there were no real surprises, Nerenhausen concluded. The PAC anticipated operating losses for its first three years, he said.
