Layoffs, Endowments, & Budgets

For reasons of state or local requirements, Americans must stay home, and some musical organizations have begun to lay off musicians (Oregon Symphony, Metropolitan Opera) or suspend their pay (NY Philharmonic). Justin Davidson has an article about the NY Phil, which includes this rather ominous paragraph:

In an interview, Philharmonic president and CEO Deborah Borda said that the orchestra has negotiated a new interim deal with its musicians: They will be paid in full until March 31, and then accept reduced pay for the next two months. Health insurance and instrument insurance will continue through the remainder of the current contract, which expires September 20.

So, the NYPO's musicians have full or reduced pay until the end of May, and health & instrument insurance for the rest of the contract - but they'll be negotiating a new contract during a time of crisis, when nobody knows when concerts will be able to resume, or what the impact of the pandemic on ticket sales will be.

Anyway, this is an interesting time to look at the budgets and endowments of a few organizations. All that follows is based on the most recent form 990 (FY 2018) for the organization, obtained at Pro Publica's Non-Profit Explorer. All numbers are in the format Budget / Endowment, so if you have a $10 million budget and $20 million endowment, $10 million / $20 million. Budget = expenditures for the most recent year.

Metropolitan Opera: $295 million / $240 million

San Francisco Opera: $78 million / $226 million

Los Angeles Opera: $43 million / $22 million (was $14 million four years before this)

San Francisco Symphony: $78 million / $302 million

NY Philharmonic: $77 million / $217 million

Oregon Symphony: $19 million / $11 million

Note that the endowments have likely taken a nosedive along with the stock market in the last few weeks, but we won't have numbers reflecting this until the 990s for the current FY are published.

A few things jump out from this:

• The largest performing arts org in the country, by budget and number of performances, has an endowment that is smaller than that of SF Symphony and just barely clears that of SF Opera. 
• The largest performing arts org in the country has a board of directors that is peppered with billionaires, yet their endowment isn't much bigger than that of the much-smaller-budget SFO.
• You really have to tip your hat to the top executives at SFS and SFO, past and present, for their endowment-directed fund-raising efforts.
• LA Opera has no cushion whatsoever, and you should be wondering why its recently-departed "general director" didn't put a little more effort into fund-raising, given that tiny endowment.

Notes:

• SFO and LAO are in there because I have a spreadsheet of their financial info for a completely different purpose; also, they're useful for comparison with the Met. 
• SFS is my not-quite-local band (I live in Oakland), but they've been extremely well-managed.
• For your amusement: the highest-paid musician at the Met is not one of their two concertmasters. It's chorus master Donald Palumbo. The highest-paid musician at SFS is concertmaster Alexander Barantschik, which you certainly would expect. The second-highest- paid is principal oboe Eugene Izotov; after that, principal trombone Timothy Higgins and principal trumpet Mark Inouye. It will be interesting to see what kind of salaries the incoming, as-yet-unknown, principal cello and flute will be able to negotiate.