Details on the Lafayette Gatling proposal to buy the Roanoke Rapids Theatre will be revealed at a special meeting of city council Thursday, according to Mayor Emery Doughtie.
That meeting will be held at 4 p.m. in the first floor conference room of city hall on Roanoke Avenue.
Doughtie declined to discuss details of the proposal until the meeting. He said, however, plans for the Chicago businessman to man to buy the struggling venue are moving forward as projected. “From what I understand conversations between our attorney and his attorney, things are moving as projected. We just had the holiday and that slowed things. There has had to be some adjustments to the documents but I'm thinking we pretty well have a document where everyone is in agreement.”
Doughtie believes the lump sum sale of the venue will help the city. “When you can pay a lump sum of the balance that can go to reducing the payment, what we're hoping to do is be able to bargain with Bank of America or look for other financing arrangements. We want to get something that's fixed. That's one of the huge benefits, to get that influx of cash to look for opportunities to get out and start receiving ad valorem tax money.”
Doughtie said there was no way the city would have received the full $21 million it invested in the venue. “When you say $21 million, it didn't cost that. It cost about $14 million. The other money was spent for improvement. We couldn't expect to recoup dollars spent on other places. Nothing today is worth what it was five years ago.”
If the city were to continue to keep holding on to the theater, Doughtie said, “We'd have to keep absorbing the cost of keeping and maintaining, and the countless hours employees spent going back out there. It's not a miracle. It's a situation to give us some breathing room and give us an opportunity to free up dollars for next year's budget. To me it's an eight to 10 year plan to get completely out of it, if the economy gets better, five to seven years, although we'd have to generate a lot of sales tax.”
