Chesterfield Center for the Arts at Chester Foundation members line up during ribbon cutting ceremony last week at the center’s new gallery/office on the Village Green. Chairperson Betty Matthews holds the scissors, Bermuda Supervisor Dorothy Jaeckle is left of her.

Weathering three terms of supervisors, winning public support in a referendum, and the challenges of raising seed money, the Chesterfield Center for the Arts at Chester project is alive and well. In fact, it’s more alive than ever.

With a program of entertainment planned for this summer on the site of the proposed center and an infusion of $400,000 from a refund from the county’s contribution to the Richmond Convention Center, the arts center, to be located in the Chester Village Green in front of the Chester Library, continues the march toward bricks and mortar.

Last month, the Chesterfield Board of Supervisors approved a proposal from Bermuda District Supervisor Dorothy Jaeckle to use funds raised through the county’s hotel transient occupancy tax slated for tourism or economic development to jump start the planning of the arts center. According to Deputy Administrator Rebecca Dixon, the hotel tax is collected for Richmond’s Convention and Visitors Bureau, but funding that isn’t used comes back to Chesterfield.

In 2003, then supervisor Jack McHale, in a last minute addition to the 2004 bond referendum, put in place $6.8 million for the art center. The center had been proposed during 1996, but only the land was funded, along with the Chester Library.

When R.M. “Dickie” King took office, he gained the support of fellow supervisors to keep the funding for the center on the referendum, which was passed overwhelmingly by voters.

Jaeckle has now taken it to the next level. She will tell you that the Chesterfield Center for the Arts at Chester Foundation (CCACF) chairman Betty Matthews is the catalyst for the recent funding, but Matthews and Dixon concur that Jaeckle went to work convincing her board contemporaries to do some early funding that will jump start the design process.

“We need a firm design that we can take to our potential contributors in order to raise our part of the money to build the center,” says Matthews.

The county’s half of the funding will not begin to be available until 2011, says Dixon. “We moved it back a little to give the foundation more time to raise their part the of cost.”

Recently, local developer George Emerson, who is also a member of the foundation financial advisory committee, paid Marcellus Wright Cox Architects, P.C. (MWC) to put together a basic conceptual plan in order to get an idea of what would fit on the land that is available and the potential cost of the building. MWC has designed art centers at the University of Richmond, Hampton-Sydney College and Steward School in Henrico, as well as many other performing arts facilities around the state. MWC estimated the cost to build the center at about $9 million.

The CCACF with the help of the Chesterfield Chamber of Commerce last week held a ribbon cutting ceremony to celebrate the opening of their new office on the Village Green just opposite the site of the art center.

During the ceremony Emerson spoke, stressing the importance of building the art center in Chester. He said that the art center is an economic investment in the community. “I look at how we can generate funds in Chesterfield County. When we’re competing with other localities for businesses to locate in places like the Meadowville Technology Park, quality of life is important to people.”

Emerson said he is not “big on the arts,” but his business sense tells him “this is the right thing to do.”

The conceptual design, which both the county and the foundation support, would consist of about 22,000 square feet and include a 400- to 500-person auditorium and a smaller “black box” performance venue, as well as gallery and studio space and dressing rooms.

The CCACF will announce schedule and a list of performers  for its summer concert series in the near future.

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