Exclusive: West Palm Beach sues to oust Palm Beach Photographic Centre
After 15 years, the city argues the center has defaulted on its lease and must vacate the prime Clematis Street location at the foot of the city library.
Nearly 20 years ago, West Palm Beach successfully courted the Palm Beach Photographic Centre to inject life into a potential dead zone at the base of the proposed city library on Clematis Street.
The center jumped at what many considered a sweetheart deal. It got about four times the space it had near Old School Square in Delray Beach. It got a 30-year lease, starting in 2008, at $10 a year. It set up a museum, classrooms and a photo store and accepted a $1 million city loan, which could be converted to a grant, to pay for air conditioning and electrical improvements.
It also took in a $500,000 construction grant from Palm Beach County from a $50 million countywide bond issue.
Fifteen years later, the city has soured on the deal. It sued the Photo Centre in June to kick it out of its 26,000-square-foot, city-owned space at 415 Clematis.
City officials won’t comment on why they are pursuing the center’s ouster but the lawyer for the center wrote in a May 2022 memo that he had gotten an inkling from city Community Redevelopment Agency Executive Director Chris Roog.
“During our meeting,” attorney Alan Rosenthal wrote, “you acknowledged that the CRA's motivation and intent was to evict PBPC from the ground-floor portion of the leased premises so that the CRA could then rent that space to a new tenant at market rates.
“This is shocking and unfortunate,” Rosenthal wrote.
Is Photographic Centre in the Top 5?
The city’s suit turns on a technicality.
To show a return on the city’s $1 million loan, the center was required starting in 2015 to provide a Palm Beach Cultural Council report called the “Annualized Standardized Report” that listed the Photo Centre among the top five producers of economic impact in Palm Beach County.
For every year of a Top 5 listing, the city would excuse $50,000 from the loan.
If the center didn’t make the Top 5, it would have to pay 15 percent of its retained earnings over $200,000 to the city, up to $50,000 a year.
Failing these two steps would constitute default, allowing the city to terminate the lease.
However, there was a problem. Neither the report ranking cultural institutions nor the retained earnings existed.
The closest report, called the “Economic Impact of Cultural Tourism in Palm Beach County,” comes out every two years and stopped providing rankings in 2017.
In 2015, the report by Surale Phillips credited the Photo Centre with drawing $66 million in total culture-related spending, second among 19 groups behind the Delray Beach Center for the Arts, now known as Old School Square.
The center fell to third in 2017 at $58 million behind Old School Square and the Kravis Center but the 2019 and 2021 reports did not offer rankings.
January event drew 7,000
In the lawsuit, the Photographic Centre argued it would have been impossible to meet the terms of the agreement because it doesn’t control the report and the city didn’t agree to an alternative measurement. Also, the city waited too long to raise the issue, the center argued.
Additionally, the center argued that except for a two-year pandemic-influenced pause, it never stopped living up to its end of the bargain, drawing an international crowd of photo aficionados downtown. In January, the center started in 1986 by Art and Fatima NeJame held its weeklong FotoFusion event, drawing an estimated 7,000 patrons.
“After having been invited to relocate to West Palm Beach nearly 15 years ago by the city's then-mayor, Hon. Lois Frankel, and after establishing itself as one of the leading photographic arts and digital imaging centers in the world, and after injecting hundreds of millions of dollars into the local economy with its programs, exhibitions and educational/cultural programs, including the world-renown FOTOfusion festival, PBPC deserves better than this,” Rosenthal wrote in his May letter to Roog.
City wouldn’t let them use City Hall
The city filed its lawsuit on June 7, asking the court to affirm the city’s right to find the center in default.
Eviction “is in the public interest,” the city argued, because it would allow the city to “re-let the premises to a tenant that will provide a greater positive economic impact to the city and its taxpayers, citizens and visitors.”
The center countered that it can’t produce a report that doesn’t exist. “Moreover, without such a report, neither the city nor CRA can demonstrate the Photo Centre is not a top-five producer of economic impact in Palm Beach County,” Rosenthal argued.
In August, the Photo Centre asked the city to let the center use City Hall, particularly the commission chambers, for its Jan. 24-28 Fotofusion events — as it had in the past. The city didn’t object to the center using the library but Administrator Faye Johnson denied the request to use City Hall. The Photo Centre claims that the city breached the lease by its refusal.
In December, Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Luis Delgado refused to throw out that claim.
In January, the city amended its complaint for a second time, asking that, if the court failed to find the center in default, that it rescind the lease, returning “the parties to their earlier position as if those agreements had never occurred.”
The city argued in favor of rescinding the deal because the center has admitted “that it is impossible for it to perform its obligations” under the lease and “the parties engaged in a mutual mistake when entering into the agreements.”
The conflict goes before a mediator on March 9, with a summer or fall trial looming if no settlement is reached.