The AT&T Performing Arts Center board of directors has elected a new chairman, D. Roger Nanney, a vice chairman at Deloitte LLP, who has served on the Performing Arts Center’s board since 2002. We sat down with Nanney to talk about his transition into this new role, and the center’s transition from a project under construction to an operating venue for the performing arts. This is the first part of that conversation. Part two will run on FrontRow tomorrow.

FrontRow: How did you get involved in the Performing Arts Center?

Roger Nanney: I moved to Dallas with my firm – I’m a partner with Deloitte – and I moved here in January of 2002. And that was just when they were beginning to get moving. I was on the board of the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, and had been really starting to get pretty involved in the arts center. So when I came here and was thinking about my community investment options, I really wanted that to continue to be involved with the arts. I looked around and there was no arts center, and I talked with some of the community leadership here and they sent me to Bill Lively. I talked to Bill about what was happening here and immediately got on board. As you can tell it is quite a legacy for the city, so it is a great project to be involved in, especially from the early start.

FR: We’re about a year out from the opening. How would you characterize where the center stands today?

RN: We’re still very much in a startup mode, coming out of a grand opening last October. But I don’t think we could have asked for the kind of success we’ve seen in terms of the reception of the community, the numbers of people who have been able to be a part of not just the opening, but the programming activities that have happened. We haven’t been without our bumps in the road, but all in all I think we’d say it’s been about as good of a success as we could have imagined, not the least of which is finishing a project, with the opening of Strauss Square, finishing a project on time and on budget of this complexity. If you watched the construction over the last several years, the kinds of things you have to do to build a world class opera venue and then the first vertical theater of its kind, it is pretty amazing. The team that worked on making this happen deserves a lot of credit.

FR: What are the priorities going into year two?

RN: That is something we are very involved in right now with the new board year starting. This year for us this is a transition year. We’ll be moving from being primarily a fund raising board and, of course, oversight of construction, to more of an operating type of a board. So we’ve actually got a retreat planned in October to get the board focused on a long term view from an operating perspective and refresh our mission and vision just to make sure we have good focus around what it is going to take to operate this center in the long term. And now we have 10 months of operating history to take a look and understand the kinds of successes we’ve had, how well we did at balancing the calendars between our resident companies and other programming that we do. So if you asked me for the one most important thing it is getting the board refocused around the operating model instead of primarily being focused on fundraising. I think you know we still have some fundraising to do, so that is not going to go off the agenda. But I’m confident in our ability to get that capital campaign complete.

FR: There is still additional capital that needs to be raised, and there are plans for an annual fund. How do you plan on tackling these fundraising challenges?

RN: We’ve just made an incredible gift – the people of Dallas have made a gift to the city of Dallas for the benefit of the community. So one of our focuses will be to introduce as many people to the center from the community and around the country as we can and begin to be more broad based to make sure we have appeal for an annual fund. But I think the key is engagement and engagement of the total community. I think we have 1,200 donors who gave $338 million towards the building of the center, and when you are building a center of this size, that was the right focus for it. But we have had such a great reception. I mean we have had 300 thousand-plus walk into the center, so I think our fundraising focus will continue to be on capital that we have left, but also reaching out to the broader community to make sure there is understanding of what’s here to offer and make the community understand to help us to continue to make this a world class venue.

FR: How come efforts to raise an annual fund weren’t started during the construction phase, to prepare for operations during the momentum created by raising money for building the venues?

RN: There’s a balance and there’s an art to how you fundraise to support a project of this scope. I think we thought the priority was to get our capital funding completed as quickly as we could, and then begin to think about the strategy about our endowment and annual fund. We do have some contributions towards our endowment to help begin to get the platform established for starting the endowment. The annual fund, you could look at it a couple of ways. We felt like we needed – or really couldn’t build an annual fund until we could point to operations so people could be able to see what they are giving to. Having said that, if you look at things like the Brinker Series, the Lexus Broadway Sponsorship and the like, we did begin to develop a funding source for ongoing operations. So I feel good about our progress, but we have some work to do there to begin to address what will be a shortfall. You don’t operate these kinds of non-profit centers with out some continuing support other than the revenues that you generate.

The other thing was of our $338 million, $16 million was designated to our resident companies to help in their transition to the center. There are a number of things you can look at that helped to solidify our base from an operating perspective. I just think we just felt like when you think about endowments and operating funds, it’s difficult to establish those in a significant way when you don’t have the buildings in place and up and running. So we felt like timing was better once we got the doors opened.

FR: A major decision that is coming up is replacing CEO Mark Nerenhausen. What qualities are you looking for in the next CEO?

RN: We’ll need someone experienced leadership, someone who has the ability to work in an environment that is as complex as this is, but has a heart for the community and has an understanding that our primary purpose here is to connect the community through culture. And then we do the very best we can to operate in an efficient manner, to minimize the need for outside funding to cure an operating deficit. So it is a big job. And it’s one that, first and foremost, you are looking for strong leadership and someone who hopefully has the right kind of experience to deal with the complexity of this sort.

FR: There aren’t that many performing arts centers out there. Do you look to PAC leaders or are comparable fields where you may find candidates?

RN: I don’t want to get ahead of our search committee, and I wouldn’t say that we would limit ourselves to just people who have specific experience running these kinds of complex sort of undertakings. We certainly will look to see if there is talent in that area that we could bring to the center. That would be potentially an advantage to have that kind of experience. But there is also the opportunity to look outside as long as you’ve got the right attributes identified and you see people that have a track record having dealt with the types of issues that you deal with in a center. We’d certainly broaden and look at those types of people. But you are right, there’s not a big population of people who work in these centers, so we’ll just have to wait and see what the results of the search produce. We’re fortunate in that we have a great team in place in terms of running the daily operations of center. Doug Curtis really understands the operation, so we are going to be thoughtful and over the course of the year we’ll get to an answer.