In Sunday’s (9/25) Denver Post, Kyle MacMillan writes, “A week of rancorous negotiations between the Colorado Symphony and its 79 full-time musicians ended Friday with the resignation of about half the orchestra’s board and the players’ agreement to an emergency 9 percent pay cut. Twenty of the 30 community members on the symphony’s board of trustees have stepped down, including three who were set to become the chairman, vice chairman and treasurer. ‘No one has been asked to leave in any way, shape or form,’ symphony spokeswoman Margaret Williams said in an e-mail Saturday. … To at least temporarily resolve what the symphony has termed a ‘cash crisis,’ it put together a reformulated 2011-12 budget based on reducing musician salaries by a total of $530,000 (two weeks of furloughs and a direct 5 percent cut to the current base pay of $41,000)—a plan the players agreed to Friday. The players on Friday had estimated that overall pay cut at 14 percent. But the musicians’ initial decision Tuesday to postpone a vote on those proposed salary cuts provoked anger on the board and led to the 20 resignations, according to Young Cho, one of the board members who has remained. … He expects at least half of them to return now that the cuts have been accepted.”
Posted September 26, 2011
