Arts foundation to
discuss future of SV arts
center
By PETER
BOLTZ
Express Staff Writer
The newly
formed Sun Valley Arts Foundation meets tonight at Sun Valley City Hall to
announce the membership of its board of directors and to hear
presentations from Aspen architect Harry Teague and Peter Donnelly from
ArtsFund in Seattle.
The meeting
from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. will be held in the Sun Valley City Council meeting
room and is open to the public.
Dan
Drackett, chairman of the SVAF board of directors, and Sun Valley Mayor
Dave Wilson said the meeting was not a function of the city government.
Drackett
said the SVAF was set to meet at the Elkhorn Resort, but a double booking
problem forced it to look for another location in short order.
So the city
offered its available space.
"We
really needed a larger room," Drackett said. "But this will do,
and it was free."
The SVAF
formed out of the arts community of the Wood River Valley in response to a
land lease offer by the city.
The city
owns a five-acre parcel of land on Sun Valley Road, contiguous to Our Lady
of the Snows Catholic Church, which it has offered to lease to the arts
community if it can come up with the money and organization to build an
arts center on it.
Some people
refer to the property as the "horse pasture," mistaking it to be
Bureau of Land Management property, Drackett said.
The
pasture, which runs the length of the north side of Sun Valley Road to its
intersection with Saddle Road, belongs to the Sun Valley Co. and is zoned
for outdoor recreational uses.
The zoning
allows for conditional uses such as an arts center.
The city
came into possession of a five-acre portion of the pasture in a land swap
deal with the Sun Valley Co. in December 2000.
In
exchange, the company got the property the old Moritz Community Hospital
was on.
Drackett
said the purpose of the SVAF is "to plan, to raise funds, to endow,
to build and to manage shared community arts facilities."
He said the
foundation has not yet been granted non-profit, 501-3c status with the
Internal Revenue Service, "but we qualify in every way."
He said he
would proceed with filing for non-profit status once the newly appointed
board of directors have had the opportunity to review the foundation’s
bylaws and articles of incorporation.
Drackett
said he welcomed input from the public about the foundation and about
proposals to build on the 5-acre parcel.
He said
Teague would present the "latest iteration" of architectural
plans for an arts campus at the meeting.