VERO BEACH — Vero Beach City Councilwoman Tracy Carroll wonders whether putting more art studios on city-owned land is in the best interest of the public when it already has access to an education wing full of them in the Vero Beach Museum of Art.
That was one of her first questions Monday when she saw the Vero Beach Art Club’s letter to the city laying out plans to build its own building, separate from the museum. The two are co-tenants of the land, but the museum owns its building and charges the club space use fees to hold meetings and events.
The city would have to OK such a proposal since it owns the land in all of Riverside Park.
“My concern when I looked at the floor plan is that the footprint looks very small. And it seems like the center will be a very large workspace-slash-studio, and the Museum of Art has already taken that on,” Carroll said. “It really offers a lot of classes and activities that the community can take part in. So I am concerned about the two entities providing exactly the same function on the same area of the park.”
She is also concerned about parking.
“We already have a situation where we have a lack of parking on weekends. I cannot picture where the building will be situated and where the parking will be, if not the retention pond.”
The letter, sent by the art club’s new president, Mary Ellen Koser, says it’s looking at about an acre on the northeast corner of the leased land.
“We have begun the process of negotiating with the museum for the use of this land and the cost of construction,” Koser’s letter reads.
But Lucinda Gedeon, the museum’s executive director, says the museum has only received a letter from the club. Discussions have not begun, and Gedeon says the museum has not responded due to the unavailability of key board members.
The club has lived somewhat in the shadow of the fast-growing museum. But it has a powerful membership of more than 400 artists who always intended to have a space of their own.
The two have shared the lease ever since the club turned over its own building fund to the group trying to build the museum back in the early 1980s. It stages the monumental Under the Oaks art show and the Art-by-the-Sea annual juried show. Started in 1936, it was the art club that originally had the lease from the city on the Riverside Park land.
In the summer of 2011, the museum imposed a fee increase on the club’s use of museum space for meetings and events. It also pays rent for a small office it keeps with the museum’s administration area.
At one point, the club made it clear it had a right to some of the co-leased land if it chose to build a home of its own, a move that could interfere with the museum’s plans for expansion. At the same time, the club began talking of having studios and gallery space elsewhere. A number of existing buildings were discussed, including in the downtown Arts District. That talk died down within a few months.
Koser did not want to comment on the letter or its contents.
Since the city acts as landlord to the two co-tenants, when the 2011 dispute began, Carroll pored through pages of documentation of the museum-art club relationship to get herself up to speed.
“I had (City Manager) Jim O’Connor pull the documents going way back between the two,” says Tracy Carroll, a Vero Beach City Council member who lives not far from the museum. “I did ask Jim about the club’s feeling that they had been pushed aside by the museum. I asked him, ‘Have they ever wanted anything else?’ And he said, no, they haven’t asked for anything. So I was a bit surprised when I saw this letter.”