The Dixon City Council is considering allocating $200,000 to The Dixon: Historic Theater in its fiscal 2027 budget, pending additional financial information from the theater.

During February budget meetings, council members agreed they needed to review the theater’s finances before voting on its request. At Monday’s council meeting, Mayor Glen Hughes said the information was not provided, so the council voted to place the budget on file with a placeholder for the theater’s funding request under the condition that it would not vote on a specific funding amount until that financial information is provided.

The budget is still a draft and can be modified. A public hearing for it will be held at the council’s next meeting at 5:30 p.m. April 6, before final voting takes place on April 20. Council meetings are held at City Hall at 121 W. Second St. in Dixon and are also streamed live on the city’s Facebook page.

“Certainly, there’s a wide variety of many needs at the theater, and they’re doing incredible work there. It’s just the evaluation of the request,” Dixon City Manager Danny Langloss said at the meeting.

Langloss pointed out that just because something is in the budget “doesn’t mean we can just go buy it” and said that “until the council determines the amount of money that will be allocated to the theater, no money will be spent on it.”

“I’m comfortable with that,” Council member Mary Oros said, referring to leaving the request as a placeholder. “That way it doesn’t hold up putting the budget on file, and we still have oversight to be able to walk through that with the theater.”

Langloss said city officials plan to meet with the theater’s financial director by next week.

Spencer Aurand, the theater’s executive director, told Shaw Local that 2025 “went very well for our first real attempt at running the theater at full capacity...having regular events happening every single week.”

On the events, Aurand said, the theater essentially broke even, spending the same amount of money on the events that it brought in.

“With money support from the city and from other private donors, we were able to cover all of our other costs, which is good. We’re on the right track,” Aurand said.

In 2026, if the requested city funds are approved, the theater plans to use them for events. It would cover about half of the $400,000 event budget the theater set for the year, Aurand said.

Since at least 2023, the city has allocated upward of $500,000 to support the theater, and council members have previously been split in their support of it because a majority of those funds were needed for operating costs, Shaw Local reported.

“We do want to ask for less money from the city going forward,” Aurand said.

“I don’t know if we have necessarily plans to stop asking the city for money altogether, just because that’s not traditionally how event centers work in communities where they want to attract visitors,” Aurand said, pointing to DeKalb’s Egyptian Theatre as an example.

For example, DeKalb’s Egyptian Theatre received city funds for many years. Those funds could only be spent on building improvements or repairs and not operating expenses, according to egyptiantheatre.org.

“If the Dixon [historic] theater is the kind of thing that the community wants to exist, I think that it’s going to be something that the city will want to support, but will actually be worthwhile for the city to support,” Aurand said.

That’s because, Aurand said, the theater will attract visitors from out of town who might get dinner, spend the night or go shopping, which would generate additional tax revenue for the city and additional customers for local businesses.

Based on data from the theater’s ticketing service, in 2025, about half of its total visitors were from areas other than Dixon. Of that, about 20% were from Sterling and Rock Falls, but nearly 1,000 were from out of state, Aurand said.

“The city should start being able to see a return on that investment,” Aurand said, adding that growing its out-of-town audience is a big focus of its 2026 marketing plan.

It’s also running a fundraising campaign to raise $1.5 million to complete needed renovations that began in 2024 and were then funded by a $1.2 million federal grant. Aurand said the remaining work includes replacing and restoring its chairs, restoring all the terrazzo floors, exterior building maintenance and modernizing its outdoor signage.