Assurances on a city vision for the Armory arts building in Somerville ran into public frustration and skepticism at a hearing Tuesday.
The draft master plan discussed at a City Council Finance Committee meeting shows the city aims to hand over governance of the building to a nonprofit or cultural trust but does not yet have a timeline for doing so. Until that transition, the city will set up a Somerville Armory Advisory Board, effectively enabling the city to expand its contentious control of the building as it explores pathways to independent governance.
The city’s continued governance is a “short-term” solution as the city prepares the building for a handoff, director of economic development Rachel Nadkarni said.
The city took the 27,000-square-foot building at 191 Highland Ave., Spring Hill, through a $5 million eminent domain land seizure in May 2021.
“There’s a want here to wrap up this process, get that buy-in, get everyone aligned on what this mission and vision of success for the building is quickly, so that we can move to a stage where we are stabilizing tendencies in the building. But we also want to keep the pathway to that independent governance progressing, which everyone identified they’d like to see us get to,” Nadkarni said.
But with three years of planning gone by and no firm schedule shown, attendees at the hearing demanded the city immediately issue leases to tenants and encouraged the city to reconsider the “start-from-scratch” approach it is taking to envision the armory’s future, citing the current successes of the building and its tenants.
In particular, speakers lauded the work of The Center for Arts at the Armory, the“anchor” tenant that is responsible for producing more than 750 events serving about 250,000 people annually. Several speakers noted they were pleased with the direction CAA had taken the building in and the programming they offer a diverse array of artists and vendors, reiterating a sentiment of “if it’s not broken, why fix it?”
In November, leaders at the center issued an ultimatum to the city, saying that if a master plan was not finished and approved by the City Council by the end of the year and on its way to implementation, it would leave. This came after the city missed an October deadline to produce a draft of the plan.
The draft master plan, released Nov. 25, says the mission of the Armory is “to protect and ensure the long-term vitality of the historic armory property as an affordable and accessible public center for art, community and culture.” The plan recommends focusing on seven areas to achieve that: support for artists and the arts, nurturing collaboration and “synergy” in the building, inspiring community, supporting creativity at all levels and scales, making clear and community-based decisions, mitigating conflict amid different needs and ensuring financial stability.
“There are a lot of balancing acts that this master plan steps right into – trying to navigate different layers,” Nadkarni said, giving the example making sure the building meets a public purpose “without the city being in command of every event.”
Arts Council head comments
Somerville Arts Council director Greg Jenkins was able to add context in a Dec. 4 phone interview, saying it had been hard to communicate broadly the difference between the city’s goals “governance as opposed to operationalizing.”
“We’re not planning on operationalizing anything,” Jenkins said, but “this building is bigger than Arts at the Armory, and this isn’t about Arts at the Army as a nonprofit. The city has been supportive of Arts at the Armory – incredibly supportive. I know they’re frustrated by the lease issue, and I totally understand that, but no one wants to kick them out. People want them to stay.”
The city’s purchasing and legal departments are being pushed to create requests for proposals – the documents that allow bidding – and other work that will allow for the long-term leases tenants want. “The vision is to create a cultural arts center. That’s what the goal has been for the past three and a half years. Are we slow? Yeah, a little bit slow. Is it a complicated process? Yes,” Jenkins said.
The governance the city is trying to provide is to take maintenance and repairs off the back of the tenants and operator of a city-owned Armory building, Jenkins said. “We are not trying to figure out how to micromanage Arts at the Armory or anybody else. We’re trying to figure out a governance model for who is going to pay for the roof when it needs replacing? Is that going to be a burden on the tenants? We don’t want that,” Jenkins said. “There’s a lot of capital costs there that anybody who takes this on is going to have to incur over the years. The city should and could provide subsidy and financial support, but how do we utilize this building to get that subsidy? That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”
“It’s pretty complex,” Jenkins said.
Public comment
About half of the 70 attendees online Tuesday spoke during the public comment period. A mix of Armory tenants, city residents, artists and arts supporters expressed pride in the current Armory and confusion or frustration at the city’s perceived neglect of current tenants during the planning process for the building’s future.
None of the Armory building’s tenants are mentioned in the context of planning within the draft.
“How is the city going to administer this plan if they cannot even make a lease for their tenants?” asked Ivan Abarca-Torres, a member of the CAA board.
Currently, the nonprofit operates on a 30-day license agreement from the city, which it says precludes it from operating effectively due to the long-term nature of booking and fundraising for events.
“[The Armory] has been an absolutely wonderful part of this neighborhood,” said Sam Jones, a nearby resident. “I go there to donate blood, to see amazing circus performances, or for a local toy convention … it’s unconscionable that the city has not been able to offer them a lease.”
Sheher-Bano Ahmed expressed doubt in the current master plan’s paths to independent governance. “Creating a new nonprofit is not practical in the short term and I don’t have faith that running the space through a [quasi] municipal trust will soon become possible, given my experience with the slow-moving state Legislature,” Ahmed said.
Stephanie Scherpf, chief executive and co-director at the Center for the Arts at the Armory, also requested the city abandon the nonprofit and cultural trust options. Instead, Scherpf suggested a tenant-involved governance. “I would like to request a legal statement from the city citing why a nonprofit organization cannot be involved in planning for the future of a city-owned building,” Scherpf said.
Councilor calls for independence
Councilor Willie Burnley Jr. shared in calls for greater urgency to enact independent governance at the Armory.
“It is incredibly frustrating to see this plan not try to move with pace toward an independent model after what I saw was a resounding desire for such a model from the community over the course of many meetings with the public and, of course, for the tenants who are already there,” Burnley said. He cast doubt on the viability of independence under this plan.
“It just doesn’t make sense to me to create a plan that says we’re going to create an advisory group that is going to create parameters for the future of this building until we can actually move to an independent body there. I think the city needs to move towards co-governance. It needs to figure out a way to actually empower the tenants and to let the folks who’ve made the Armory what it is today, not only an asset in the traditional financial sense, but a true home for the arts in the community,” Burnley said.
The city said it will take the master plan under review, consider the latest public feedback and decide how to proceed. The plan is expected to go before the council in early 2025.
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