Trump administration must provide Kennedy Center renovation plans to board members before key closure vote, judge rules

By Devan Cole, Betsy Klein, CNN

(CNN) — A slew of documents related to President Donald Trump’s efforts to close and extensively renovate the Kennedy Center must be turned over to a Democratic congresswoman who sits on the center’s board ahead of a Monday vote on the president’s plan, a federal judge has ruled.

US District Judge Christopher Cooper said in a lengthy decision Saturday that Ohio Rep. Joyce Beatty has a right to the information so she can meaningfully participate in the upcoming White House meeting, during which the storied performing arts center is poised to approve the plan by Trump, who last year installed himself as its chair.

“A project of this salience and magnitude — which threatens to involve at least some demolition and reconstruction of a major national memorial and active performing arts theater — does not happen overnight,” Cooper wrote. “If it is the case that many external advisors and Board members have been consulted, the financing is set, and already-made decisions are currently being implemented on-site, there must be some concrete information to share with the full Board, including Beatty.”

Trump administration lawyers had argued that the renovation plans were “preliminary” and not “finalized,” suggesting that the president would be involved in fine-tuning details for the closure until the last minute.

Cooper said that argument “borders on preposterous.”

Beatty, an ex-officio member of the Kennedy Center’s board, is challenging the legality of Trump’s plan to temporarily close the building. She had also asked Cooper to intervene to ensure she had a right to vote during Monday’s meeting, contending that the board’s decision to change its rules last year to prohibit ex-officio members from casting a vote was unlawful and therefore must be blocked.

Though Cooper agreed that the rule change “is likely void,” he stopped short of also ordering officials to permit Beatty to cast a vote next week, saying she had not shown how her challenge to that change months after it occurred warranted his intervention now.

“The marginal harm to her from not voting is much less, as she will be able to lodge her objections on the record and have the opportunity to persuade her colleagues of her position,” he wrote.

Beatty had filed a two-pronged lawsuit against Trump and other appointed members of the board, and Saturday’s ruling addresses the immediate concern of the upcoming board meeting.

“No president has the authority to shut Congress out of the governance of the Kennedy Center, much less unilaterally rename or demolish it. We will not stand by while an important part of our national heritage is jeopardized, and I intend to make that clear at next week’s board meeting,” she said in a statement moments after the judge’s ruling.

The congresswoman has also asked the judge to halt the center’s planned closure until it receives congressional approval.

The renovations announced by Trump last month mark his latest effort to overhaul the center and place his mark on culture in the nation’s capital. He gutted the board and installed loyalists who elected him chair and voted in December to rename the venue the “Trump Kennedy Center” — a move Beatty is challenging in court.

But the changes have also led to slumping ticket sales and a dwindling number of performances as prominent artists have canceled their appearances — which some saw as driving the desire to temporarily close.

Ahead of the Monday White House meeting, Trump announced that Richard Grenell, a longtime ally who has been serving as the center’s president, would be replaced by Matt Floca, its current vice president of facilities operations, after the president became frustrated with a slew of negative headlines about his revamp of the arts institution, multiple sources told CNN.

Trump also posted a pair of renderings of what he said the “new, highly improved” building will look like on Friday afternoon, both actions making clear that the project is still top of mind despite global conflicts.

Beatty’s lawsuit includes sworn declarations from experts in performing arts center management who warn about significant impacts to bookings, donors and staff should the two-year closure, which Trump says will start in July, take effect.

Deborah Borda, the president emerita of the New York Philharmonic, oversaw major renovations and construction at multiple major venues, including the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and David Geffen Hall in New York City.

“In my professional judgment, the harms from a closure of the Kennedy Center at the scale and on the timeline announced are severe, immediate, and cannot be quickly reversed,” Borda said in a sworn declaration.

She added: “The visiting performers who are removed from the schedule will find alternative venues and will not return quickly. The staff who depart will be difficult to replace. The donors who redirect their giving will develop new institutional loyalties. The audiences who fall out of the habit of attending will … require years of effort and investment to recover.”

And Mallory Miller, the Kennedy Center’s former assistant manager of dance programming, described the long-cultivated relationships her former team has worked to manage with ballet companies.

Those relationships, she said, “are not abstractions. They are relationships developed over many years by experienced arts administrators who understood those companies’ artistic needs, earned the trust of their directors and managers, and could credibly represent the Kennedy Center as a committed long-term partner.”

Miller warned that the closure “will sever whatever goodwill remains and will likely be understood by those companies as a definitive rupture, not a temporary pause.”

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