The Mansfield Center’s advisory board met in January and spent the bulk of their time discussing fundraising options for the facility.

During their December meeting, board members of the Mansfield Center for the Performing Arts Foundation, a private non-profit created to help fundraise for the facility, told the city’s advisory board that the foundation was dissolving after about nine years.

Dusty Molyneaux and Hillary Shepherd, current foundation board members, told the group that they had started the process of dissolving the foundation and wanted to know what the remaining $5,000 in their bank account could be used toward, according to the meeting minutes.

While filing paperwork to dissolve the foundation, they discovered it wasn’t set up properly and need to reword the bylaws.

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Molyneaux told the city’s advisory board that their goals in creating the foundation had been to help fund new seats and a new ceiling and those projects are now underway without the foundation, according to the meeting minutes.

Molyneaux told the group he wanted out of the foundation, but Shepherd said she’d keep things going and the city’s board is looking at options to maintain the foundation.

During the Jan. 17 Mansfield advisory board meeting, Amanda Brumwell said she got copies of the foundation’s articles of incorporation and bylaws. She asked if the city board took over the foundation, would it become a city nonprofit.

Owen Grubenhoff, Mansfield Center manager, said that it would not.

The Mansfield foundation would remain private and operate to support the Mansfield, much like the private foundations that support Park and Recreation, the Great Falls Public Library, Great Falls Police Department and Great Falls Fire Rescue.

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Brumwell asked what the foundation could do the advisory board could not.

Carl Donovan, board member, said that the foundation could fundraise toward lighting, theater equipment and other things the city can’t afford within its current budget.

Grubenhoff said the City Commission would still have to approve such purchases but didn’t know why they wouldn’t.

Donovan said the foundation could also potentially purchase cooking facilities in the convention center to allow the facility to host more dinners rather than requiring caterers.

Grubenhoff said he believed the advisory board could help find new members for the foundation board, which could also potentially fund events that may not otherwise occur.

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Randy Knowles said he was working on a fundraising idea of raffling off a hunt of some kind.

The board also discussed the status of the theater seat replacement project.

City Commissioners approved a $995,190 contract in December to Wadsworth Builders to replace the seats in the Mansfield Theater at the Civic Center.

The project is part of a larger package of projects the city is funding through the State-Local Infrastructure Partnership Act that the Montana Legislature approved in 2023.

During the Jan. 17 advisory board meeting, Grubenhoff said he believed staff was closer to figuring out seat size and spacing. He said they were going with deeper and wider seats, but trying to maintain about 1,500 seats.

The theater currently has 1,780 seats with 917 on the main floor, 282 on the lower balcony and 581 on the upper balcony, according to the city.

The city was allocated $755,461 of SLIPA funds and commissioners approved the package of projects for SLIPA funding in March 2024 and ratified contracts with Commerce in September 2024 for each project.

Replacement of auditorium seating installed in 1938 with newer more comfortable seats that still maintain historic character. The project was identified as a potential priority use of ARPA funds in 2022. The previous commission decided to wait until the city received notification of the result of an application for the Montana Historic Preservation Grant application. The city was awarded a $250,000 grant. This was a tier two ARPA project.

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The project was initially estimated at $650,000 and the city received $487,500 in SLIPA funds for the project, plus $162,500 of downtown tax increment financing funds for the project.

Since the initial approval, city staff worked with Nelson Architect on design and bid documents for the project that includes demolition of the existing seats on the main floor and the balcony, grinding and recoating of the floor, and re-carpeting of both the main floor and the balcony landing areas.

The city received four bids for the project in November, all of which were higher than the initial estimate, ranging from $1,534,773.45 to the lowest bid of $995,190 from Wadsworth.

The increase was in part due to the amount of seating needed, a complete demolition and reconstruction plan and inflation since the last estimate, according to city staff.

The biggest cost included in the bids is the seating supply and installation, according to staff.

Staff considered options for the higher bids, including canceling the project entirely and releasing the SLIPA funds back to the state, cutting the project scope to only replace seats on the main floor, or moving forward with the project by identifying additional funding.

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Sylvia Tarman, city project manager, told commissioners during their Dec. 3 meeting that funds like SLIPA are rare and staff doesn’t expect to see similar funding in the foreseeable future.

She said that cutting the project scope would have other impacts, such as mismatched theater seating and additional expenses replacing the second set of seats since the city would pay a second round of contractor mobilization, shipping and material costs.

City staff recommended moving forward with the full project, despite the overage of $345,190, plus $12,000 in design fees to Nelson Architects.

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Staff said the overage will be covered by remaining COVID relief funds and staff is working with the contractor and suppliers to trim the project cost if possible and exploring fundraising options to reduce the impact on COVID funds.

Tarman said those fundraising options could include new seat sponsorships or selling the old seats.

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Tarman said in December that staff is planning to complete the seating replacement project in conjunction with the theater ceiling restoration project so that the seats could be removed, simplifying the scaffolding the ceiling contractor needs, potentially reducing some cost to that component of the project.

Staff told commissioners in December that there is a foundation for the Mansfield Theater that could accept community donations toward the project.

Grubenoff said during the Jan. 17 advisory board meeting that he hoped to have options for seat materials at their next meeting in February.

Tarman told The Electric on Feb. 6 that the fundraising effort hadn’t started yet as they were waiting on samples that she just received. She said city staff was putting together a presentation and hoped to start reaching out to potential community donors next week.

Grubenhoff said the theater calendar is blocked out from May 20 through the first week of October for construction.

He said he’s hoping it doesn’t take that long but they can’t book shows and risk the work being incomplete.

The convention center will also be closed for the summer since it will be used to store the theater seating during demolition and installation.

Grubenhoff told the advisory board in January that “we’re gonna sell as many as possible” of the old seats.

Grubenhoff told the board he was also hiring a consulting firm to look at the Mansfield Center’s business model, rental structure and get some public input on programming.

He said there were things they aren’t doing that the public wants and he expects the consultant’s report to be completed within six months.

The theater hosted a Hitchcock movie night series in January with more than 100 tickets sold for the first three shows. Grubenhoff said that they paid 50 percent of ticket prices to the licensing company, but also took in 20 percent of revenue from concession sales.

He said they plan to do the movie series again when the seat project is completed, likely focused on kids and families.