The Pittsburgh Center for Arts & Media laid off 40 people Monday and its executive director, Dorinda Sankey, left. The nonprofit also closed the Regent Square Theater and said it would stop booking films to show at Downtown’s Harris Theater.
Ms. Sankey, 57, a 30-year veteran of the organization, was promoted to chief administrative officer in October 2018 and ran the organization. A public statement said she “stepped down.”
A list of job titles prepared for the arts group on Nov. 22 and obtained by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette shows that a 57-year-old “chief executive officer” was “selected for termination/eligible for severance.”
Kyle Houser, who became chief creative director at the same time Ms. Sankey was promoted, was named executive director.
The arts group will continue to offer classes but after Dec. 31, it will no longer occupy the Charles Marshall mansion on Fifth Avenue. Instead, the arts group will use other properties on the campus — the Scaife mansion and the Marshall annex.
In a statement, board President Christine Holtz said the Marshall mansion was too expensive to maintain.
“The crushing expenditures needed to support basic operations and maintenance, let alone critically needed repairs, proved to be too much to sustain as a tenant,” she said.
Completed in 1912, the mansion was donated to the City of Pittsburgh in 1943 and opened in 1945 as the Arts and Crafts Center of Pittsburgh.
The city owns the arts organization’s three buildings and its campus as well as Mellon Park, where it is located.
Tim McNulty, a spokesman for Mayor Bill Peduto, said the center’s lease “is up at the end of the year and the city and PCAM are renegotiating the terms, given their financial situation. They are an important partner of the city and that’s why we’re working with them on a new lease structure.”
For decades, the arts organization had a lease with the city for $1 a year. In exchange, the arts group promised to maintain the Charles Marshall mansion, the Alan Scaife mansion, where the city has some offices, and the Marshall annex, a classroom building behind the Marshall mansion.
“We expect it will stay at a dollar and the terms on capital investments to the property will have to be renegotiated in some way,” Mr. McNulty said..
The layoffs, announced two days after the annual Three Rivers Film Festival ended, were conducted by Tiffany A. Jenca, an attorney with Cozen O’Connor, and Ms. Holtz and Mr. Houser.
Tina M. Dillman, who joined the nonprofit July 1, said it suffered from poor management.
“It has a history of making poor financial decisions. We didn’t have a development director,” Ms. Dillman said, adding that no one was writing grants, either.
When she arrived, Ms. Dillman said, she was given a budget that had been passed by the board. After going over it with a staff accountant, she found several errors.
“There were line items pulled from previous budgets. There were numbers from a project that Laura [Domencic] ran that no longer existed. I came in with a fake budget that was in the red by $20,000,” Ms. Dillman said.
Laura Domencic, a former center employee, has not worked there for at least two years.
The Harris Theater, which often shows documentaries and foreign films, is owned by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.
“The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust was not consulted in the Pittsburgh Center for Arts and Media’s decision,” said Robin Elrod, a spokesman for the organization. “We are currently evaluating next steps for use of this Trust venue and we look forward to continuing to play the finest international films and documentaries in Pittsburgh’s Cultural District.”
Ms. Elrod said was not known whether the Harris would continue to operate through the end of the year.
First Published: November 25, 2019, 9:38 p.m.