Two seemingly unrelated topics were touched on in last week’s GazetteLeader:
• The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors directed staff to evaluate the possibility of partnering with the McLean Project for the Arts on an additional gallery venue in McLean.
• The same supervisors began a process that might (emphasis on “might”) lead to establishment of an independent body to oversee development, financing and construction of future recreation/performance venues across the county.
While unconnected, the two articles seem to indicate supervisors are interested in upping the county’s game in terms of such purpose-built spaces. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but taxed-to-the-hilt Fairfax County residents need to keep watch to make sure things don’t spiral out of control.
Residents of neighboring Arlington County have one word for their Fairfax compatriots: “Artisphere.” That was the Arlington government’s attempt at a major performance/arts venue, using the old Newseum space in Arlington.
Fueled by an overly simplistic, overoptimistic and scarcely vetted business plan, the government arts emporium opened to great fanfare and then proceeded to bleed taxpayers dry until a later county manager mercifully put it, and those taxpayers, out of their collective misery by shutting it down.
The same could happen in Fairfax – on a larger scale, as everything in Fairfax is on a larger scale – if there isn’t hard-nosed oversight of proposals that could be coming down the pike. Modest subsidies of such spaces are one thing; never-ending rivers of red ink quite another.
Artisphere, Artisphere, Artisphere. Say it so often, Fairfax leaders, that it rings in your ears so as to not repeat the mistake.
