SANTA MONICA, CA-The city council here will review proposals on June 11 about the future of the landmark Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.

The faded auditorium, a 3,000-seat venue which once hosted the Academy Awards and the famed T.A.M.I. Show, a concert featuring James Brown, the Rolling Stones and Chuck Berry, has been the subject of ongoing public and private discussions.

The June 11 city council meeting is expected to formalize a direction for plans on preserving the venue. But at least one city official allowed that other options, including demolition, are possible.

The facility is slated to be partially mothballed on June 30 as a money-saving tactic. Renovating the Civic Auditorium has been pegged as a $50-million project. The facility costs the city $2 million per year to operate and it has operated in the red for several years, according to Jessica Cusick, the cultural affairs manager for Santa Monica.

But some experts have pegged the $50-million renovation figure as low, and have said that the Civic Auditorium would need far more money in upgrades to compete as a stand-alone cultural institution.

“We will go back to council on June 11 with a report on what might be an interim use for the closed facility and ways it might move forward with renovation or other possibilites,” says Cusick. Asked to define other possibilities, she tells GlobeSt.com, “obviously, we could sell the building. We could tear it down. That's not extremely likely. Or we could issue an RFP for anyone who wants to propose something.”

The Urban Land Institute, a non-profit education and research group, has already made recommendations to the city council about revitalizing the Civic Auditorium through use of its adjacent land, now largely taken up by a parking lot.

David Waite, the incoming chairman of the Urban Land Institute, says a ULI technical advisory panel's experts said in early May that while the Civic Auditorum is worthy of preservation, “it remains a daunting economic challenge to do it and pay for the improvements to make it a long-term viable asset for the city.”

The ULI recommendations, Waite tells GlobeSt.com, are a combination of commercial, residential, institutional and other mixed-use to take advantage of the open space surrounding the building. “But it really is a holistic approach, one that would require a high level of community engagement in terms of what they want to see, the scope of development,” Waite says. “But clearly, there's an opportunity.” Waite says city officials have appeared initially receptive to ULI development recommendations.

Cusick says the ULI recommendation is to keep the Civic Auditorium and restore it as both a symbol of civic pride and an important cultural icon. The specific recommendation was to “leverage the asset the parking lot represents by creating a type of mixed-use creative campus which could combine for-profit and non-profit uses that would be compatible.”

She defined the possibilities as “creative offices for movie directors and other types of creative individuals, a hotel, bars, restaurants, black box theatres, a variety of uses that would be complimentary. They talk about the creation of a harmonious creative campus.”

The Civic Auditorium has local landmark status, and is eligible to be placed on the national register as well, but has not gone through the process. Any changes to the building “would require a certificate of appropriateness,” Cusick says.

There are events being held at the facility until the June 30 partial mothballing, Cusick says. She declined to estimate the cost of closing the facility, but noted that it would continue to be used even after June 30. The east wing of the building will continue as meeting space for non-public events and the main hall will be available for filming and/or use as a sound stage, she says.

Santa Monica city councilman Kevin McKeon, who has been actively monitoring the talks about the Civic Auditorium's future, tells GlobeSt.com that the loss of redevelopment agency revenue “creates an opportunity for public/private partnership investment in an historic property with new transit-enhanced potential.”

As reported earlier by GlobeSt.com, another Santa Monica iconic property recently changed owners.