SPAC Back In Black

The much-maligned Saratoga Performing Arts Center in upstate New York, which presents a popular summer slate of shows featuring the Philadelphia Orchestra and New York City Ballet, has balanced its budget for fiscal 2005 several months after a large part of its board and executive team turned over in the wake of a fiscal-mismanagement scandal. Special gifts amounting to $700,000 were arranged by the new team over the past few months to put the center in the black. (For the record, that’s $700,000 more in major gifts than the previous administration managed to raise in the last three years.) However, SPAC isn’t out of the woods yet: the center says it will need to raise an additional $10 million to bring its endowment back up to healthy levels.