The ambitious, troubled Arts Center of North Texas, a joint project of six cities in Collin County north of Dallas, is foundering after the City of Frisco voted down a proposed bond issue to raise their share of the center’s cost last May, reports the Allen Community News. Faced with the failure of their plan to recoup the missing Frisco money, and facing skepticism from the cites of Plano and Allen, the center’s board voted last week to adopt Plan B, in which the center will either be suspended, dissolved or spun off into a non-publicly funded nonprofit.
Luckily, there’s no need to wait for construction to be completed- you can take a virtual tour online! The slick salesmanship behind the sprawling project tells the story: developers Briar Ridge Investments donated 124 acres left over from Twin Creeks, a Master Planned Golf Community they developed next door, to the proposed publicly-funded arts center. The twists and turns of the land deal got ugly last May when a lawsuit, later dismissed, alleged that a muddled transfer of title on one parcel of the land, later corrected, was a scam to avoid property taxes.