Quote:
Originally Posted by graciegirl
Just to summarize
There was a group who wanted a performing arts center some years ago and Mark Morse offered to enlarge the Church on the Square and they turned him down.They wanted something bigger or to their plans.
The church on the square had been used by a church early on and then for many years had a rotating bunch of non denominational speakers at noon on Sunday. The building was used for a variety of musical events including The Villages Philharmonic. Some of the smaller groups were very inexpensive.
Here is the letter sent by Mark Morse to Janet Tutt in 2010.
http://www.districtgov.org/images/wh...nterLetter.pdf |
Interesting letter. They obviously did it as inexpensively as possible with absolute minimum risk involved. That is pretty apparent looking at the finished product. And I can't really say that I blame them for that. They are being very conservative.
What I don't see in this letter is any mention of demographics surrounding some of these struggling centers. The Villages is now at about 110,000 people and growing. A bigger facility in a better location would also draw from Wildwood, Summerfield, Bellevue, Fruitland Park, Leesburg and even Ocala not to mention Weirsdale and communities up that way.
The Villages also has a good percentage of it's population that has the disposal income to enjoy a facility.
I don't know what kind of studies were done so I really can't have an opinion based on any real numbers, but it does seem to me that this area could stand a bigger performance center.