The effort to bring a major performing arts center to Clark County is ready to staff up with a new executive director and a professional fundraiser.
Longtime Executive Director Kathy McDonald of the nonprofit Southwest Washington Center for the Arts said the time has come to search nationally for her replacement — and to include a huge salary bump for an experienced hire who can guide the complicated and expensive project from vision to reality at last.
“I’ve gotten us this far, but we need somebody with deep experience who can shepherd this through the whole process, all the way to the day we open our doors,” McDonald said.
Posted earlier this month, the salary range for the new executive director position is $150,000 to as much as $200,000 annually. McDonald said she hopes someone will be hired by the spring.
McDonald said she’ll also be searching nationally for a professional fundraiser to join the team.
The Southwest Washington Center for the Arts aims to build a multifaceted performing arts facility, featuring a main auditorium with 1,200 to 1,400 seats, as well as smaller, modular spaces that can be used as community theaters, classrooms, galleries and more.
“Education and community connection are really key to this,” McDonald said.
After years of pressing for a downtown Vancouver location, supporters of the Southwest Washington Center for the Arts idea have moved their proposal east. McDonald said the group still aims to buy 1 acre in the northwest corner of Columbia Palisades, a mixed-use community now under development on 192nd Avenue, just off state Highway 14, near Camas city limits.
The site overlooks the Columbia River and would be an attractive and centralized draw for people from all over Clark County, McDonald said, as well as from Portland via the nearby Interstate 205 Bridge.
A parking garage would be about a block away, she said. Parking won’t be free, though.
“It will be like going to downtown Portland to go to a concert,” McDonald said.
According to a financial statement filed with the IRS, the salary of the executive director of Beaverton, Ore.’s Patricia Reser Center for the Arts — which opened in 2022 and is seen as a comparable facility — was $138,498 in 2023. McDonald’s own pay in 2023 was about half of that, according to a financial statement, so this new hire means a significant pay rise for the position.
As envisioned now, the Southwest Washington Center for the Arts project is expected to cost about $60 million. That will come entirely from private and philanthropic sources, not from taxpayers, McDonald said.
“We’ve already raised millions,” she said.
Farther east
Meanwhile, an effort to build a similar arts facility and theater just a few miles farther east, on Port of Camas-Washougal property on the Washougal waterfront, has dramatically downsized after a consultant’s feasibility study warned against anything huge.
“Our initial idea of having our main auditorium seat about 1,200-plus was shooting a little too high,” President Clare Hovland of the Columbia River Arts & Cultural Foundation told The Camas-Washougal Post Record earlier this year. “Scaling down … the main auditorium makes sense.”
