A federal judge who has temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s plan to close the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for renovations issued an order on Tuesday that gave officials three days to update him on its plan.
The Kennedy Center has pushed back on the judge’s ruling that suspended the administration’s plan to close the center for two years.
In the interim, Judge Christopher R. Cooper of Federal District Court in Washington asked for a status report from the Kennedy Center that would include plans for “public access and ongoing programming, activities and operations” should the center stay open past July 4, which the president proposed as a closing date.
The brief directive came days after the Kennedy Center’s board, composed largely of Mr. Trump’s allies, voted to appeal an order by the judge who found that the renaming of the institution after the president had been unlawful.
In the final hours before a deadline to take Mr. Trump’s name off the building’s marble facade, both the district court and an appeals court rejected the center’s requests to pause the removal order pending its appeal.
Mr. Trump’s name came off the building early Saturday morning, after workers built a towering matrix of scaffolding and covered it in tarp, obscuring the view of a crowd gathered to see the removal.
In temporarily blocking the decision to shutter the center, Judge Cooper found that board members had not properly vetted a directive from Mr. Trump, the board chairman, to close the building for what he called “Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding.”
In his order, delivered late last month, Judge Cooper found that the board had “based its decision on an insufficient, one-sided presentation of information and neglected to consider the full range of its statutory obligations and potential adverse consequences of closure on programming and memorial functions.”
The center has been preparing to shutter the building since February. It has laid off staff, canceled several touring Broadway productions and asked the National Symphony Orchestra, which plays in its concert hall, to seek alternative venues. Online, its programming calendar for the summer is largely bare; on weekends in July, there are free outdoor film screenings of movies such as “Superman” and “The Princess Diaries.”
The judge said he would not prevent the board from proceeding with a two-year closure if it scrutinized the potential consequences and made a “considered, independent decision.”
Last week, at its first meeting since the judge’s order, the board did not vote again to authorize the center’s closing.
Lawyers for Mr. Trump and the center have argued that the maintenance needs that required its closure were urgent.
“People entering the Building under present conditions will be in serious danger, and risk of injury, or beyond,” said the filing, which was submitted by a lawyer for the Justice Department. “Certain areas are already roped off for this reason. The Building is also in bad shape, and unsightly to look at, a constant source of conversation within the Washington, D.C., area.”
A three-judge panel with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied the center’s request for an immediate, emergency stay of the lower court’s order. But it will consider the government’s argument for a stay in the coming weeks.
The judge’s order was in response to a lawsuit by Representative Joyce Beatty, a Democrat of Ohio and ex officio member of the Kennedy Center board. In her suit, Ms. Beatty questioned whether the closure was designed to obscure the fact that, since Mr. Trump’s takeover of the center, there have been declining audiences and boycotts from artists unwilling to associate with the increasingly politicized institution.
But Matt Floca, the center’s executive director and Mr. Trump’s point person on the renovations, has argued that a two-year closure was the most responsible path forward to address serious maintenance problems such as water leaks, outdated equipment and discolored exterior marble.
The post Judge Orders Kennedy Center to Make a Plan for Staying Open appeared first on New York Times.
