Trump’s handpicked Kennedy Center board approves two-year closure

By Betsy Klein, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump’s handpicked Kennedy Center board of trustees voted Monday to close the storied performing arts institution for two years for renovations.

The vote, the arts center said in a press release, was unanimous.

Trump announced the planned closure earlier this year. Monday’s stamp of approval from the board — which last year voted to rename the complex the Trump Kennedy Center — was widely expected and is just the latest effort to impose the president’s style and cultural tastes in the nation’s capital.

“It’s a little late for the board because we’ve already announced it,” Trump as the meeting was convening. “These are minor details, but I think everybody agrees,” he said, adding that new seating and marble for the renovation has already been purchased.

The closure, he added, “will enable us to complete the work much faster.”

Ex-officio members of the board whose position is mandated by Congress were permitted to attend the meeting at the White House but were not allowed to vote.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat who serves as an ex-officio member because he is ranking member of a committee that oversees the arts center, declined to attend, saying in a statement that he refused to “serve as a prop” at the meeting, which he described as a “sham.”

Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio, who’s filed a lawsuit against Trump and the board, told CNN before the meeting that she planned to be “vocal.”

Part of Beatty’s complaint has been about Monday’s meeting — specifically ensuring that she and other ex-officio members would receive documents about the renovation plans beforehand and that she would be allowed to participate and vote. A federal judge ruled Saturday requiring the Trump administration to turn over relevant documents, but he did not weigh in on whether Beatty could vote. Beatty called the documents “inadequate” in a statement.

Separately, the lawsuit deals with the center’s closure more broadly. Beatty’s complaint cites sworn declarations from multiple performing arts experts who warn about major impacts to bookings, donors and staffing.

“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,” Deborah Borda, the president emerita of the New York Philharmoni, said in her sworn declaration.

“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,” added Borda, who’s overseen 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.

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 — that she thinks could now be at risk.

The closure “will sever whatever goodwill remains and will likely be understood by those companies as a definitive rupture, not a temporary pause,” she wrote in a declaration.

During his first year back in office, Trump gutted the center’s board and installed loyalists who elected him chairman. They have reshaped its leadership and staffing, overhauled its programming and secured $257 million in congressional funding for renovations. Taken together, the changes have led to slumping ticket sales and major artists canceling their appearances, which some saw as driving the desire to temporarily close.

Trump has been unhappy with some of the negative publicity around the Kennedy Center, announcing Friday he planned to replace its president, his longtime ally Richard Grenell, with Matt Floca, its vice president of facilities operations.

“There was a story he got fired; he didn’t get fired. He was here for a short period of time, for a year, figuring it out with Matt and everybody else. And Matt now is going to take over,” Trump said Monday, while thanking Grenell and praising Floca.

“He’s a pro at construction, great at construction, and I think Matt would like to run the facility too. He’s fallen in love with it, and I think he’d do a good job, but if I don’t think he will do a good job, I’ll say, ‘Matt, you’re fired. I’m getting somebody else,’” Trump said.

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