By , and President Donald Trump’s handpicked Kennedy Center board voted Tuesday to immediately shutter the performing arts center, a source familiar with the decision said, after its members argued the institution is in “dire” financial and structural shape.
The board’s vote came shortly after a federal judge in Washington, D.C., rejected the board’s latest effort to add Trump’s name to the building’s facade — a move the board says is necessary to save the memorial to John F. Kennedy from bankruptcy.
The center was initially scheduled to close on July 5.
was the third time since February that the board voted to close the center for renovations for a two-year period. Ex-officio board member Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, has challenged those efforts in court, saying the board had not done its due diligence before deciding to needs to close the venue and had not fully investigated whether it would be possible to keep parts of the center open during renovations.
Attorneys for the board have said the legal action has kept them from doing necessary repairs, but the judge presiding over the case noted at a hearing Tuesday — as he had previously — that his earlier order preventing full closure allowed for emergency repairs.
Trump, the board’s chairman, joined the closed-door meeting virtually and spent several minutes criticizing both Beatty and the judge who blocked his name from being added to the façade, according to a source familiar with the meeting.
In a separate resolution that was not expected to be taken up Tuesday, the Kennedy Center said it “is in a dire financial position” and facing potential bankruptcy after it “exhausted its fiscal resources” and that only the board’s chairman, President Donald Trump, is in a position to rescue it.
In order to do so, the board had said he would have to be recognized for his efforts on the exterior of the building.
“The Kennedy Center is in such a precarious fiscal position that it will not be able to support its payroll obligations, nor routine maintenance contracts within a matter of weeks,” the draft resolution that was made public in a court filing said. “While actively considering alternative means of fiscal survival, President Trump has offered to step in and raise the necessary funds to keep the Center from bankruptcy during its much needed renovation.”
“With certain fiscal collapse within weeks, the board seeks to determine what recognition and acknowledgement will comply” with the judge’s earlier order banning the center from being renamed the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
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The board had voted last month to instead add the words “renovated and restored by President Donald J. Trump” to the building and to rename the property “President Donald J. Trump Plaza” by Sept. 8. The new draft resolution offered numerous other similar suggestions.
In a ruling issued just ahead of the board vote, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper found the board’s latest attempt to add Trump’s name to the facade was also illegal.
“Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing. The board resolution bucks a federal court order and a statute Congress enacted.”
He also noted the board’s threat about fundraising — as well as another that the center may need to be razed if Trump’s repair plan isn’t followed — with skepticism.
The “government offered ‘no proof that current or future donations hinge on President Trump’s name being on the building’ and ‘no competent evidence that removing the Trump name would prevent the Center from fulfilling its artistic mission, as it has done for the last sixty years,’” he wrote.
“In fact, evidence before the Court pointed in the opposite direction: The renaming of the Center coincided with declines in revenue and contributions, as artists cancelled performances, the Washington National Opera ended its 50-year residency, and ticket sales and viewership of the Kennedy Center Honors broadcast dropped precipitously. The Board also has access to the $257 million that Congress appropriated for necessary capital improvements,” Cooper wrote, but that’s “beside the point for present purposes.”
“The Court appreciates that major supporters of cultural institutions are routinely recognized with prominent inscriptions on buildings and in other public areas. But Congress had other ideas for the Kennedy Center. It limited such memorials and donor recognitions to discrete (and discreet) areas, so as not to detract from the Center’s function as an ongoing memorial to President Kennedy. The current Board’s apparent disagreement with that approach does not change the law,” he wrote.
Cooper said he could “not license a violation of those authorities under threat that some unidentified donors will withhold their largesse if the Board is not allowed to have its way. It can even less reward a decision by Board members, including the Chair, to curb the Center’s fundraising efforts because they cannot abide statutory restrictions on displaying his name.”
Beatty praised Cooper’s ruling in a statement, saying “The law is extremely clear: The John F. Kennedy Center is named for President Kennedy — and no one else. But President Trump is holding the Kennedy Center hostage unless he can put his name on this sacred memorial.”
“This unlawfulness is as breathtaking as it is wrong, and it needs to stop,” she said.
“Legal sanity has once again prevailed over Trump’s vanity,” her attorneys, Norm Eisen of Democracy Defenders Action and Nathaniel Zelinsky of Washington Litigation Group, said in a joint statement.
This article originally appeared on NBCNews.com.
