Koenig felt support waning from Bulger and Gray. She began to wonder how she ended up in this spot.
“I’m an experienced professional,’’ she said. “Why did they bring me in? What were they looking for?’’
At the same time, Koenig began talking more with a group of less-prominent board members. They were led by Steven M. Weiner, an attorney who had joined the board in 2005 and, by his own admission, remained content playing a supporting role over the years.
Now he wanted to dig in. Weiner knew the depth of the crisis. When Opera America held its annual conference in Boston that spring, for example, Opera Boston’s credit cards were maxed. So Koenig wrote checks from her personal bank account to pay for the company’s registration in the national conference.
Weiner formed a committee that included Jill Fopiano a senior vice president with US Trust, Anthony Pangaro, a principal of Millennium Partners-Boston and David Speltz, an investments company founder who had previously run a hospital turnaround company, Speltz & Weis. They met on Nov. 17 and quickly determined the bottom line: The board needed to provide money to erase the deficit.
That wasn’t going to happen. Bulger, speaking this week, said that the Weiner committee’s plan wasn’t a plan at all.
“It wasn’t doing away with the debt,’’ he said. “It was just putting it off to a later date.’’
By then, he added, Gray and other board members were tapped out. Normally, in the fall, Gray gives about $40,000. During this crisis, she had provided $120,000. Bulger had given twice his normal fall gift of $25,000.
On Nov. 30, things got worse. Fidelity rejected Opera Boston’s grant request. In e-mails, Bulger told the board of the crisis deepened by Fidelity and Fuller. He called for a meeting in December to discuss Opera Boston’s future. And Gray told Weiner to disband his committee. The crisis was so great the larger board needed to deal with it.
Weiner and his committee disagreed. They felt marginalized and frozen out. Three of them resigned, joining two other trustees and an overseer who would be gone by Dec. 20, when nine of Opera Boston’s 11 remaining board members voted to dissolve the company.
“This has been a wrenching experience,’’ said Bulger of the final vote. “I’ve never gone through this in my life.’’
Earlier this month, Gil Rose sat at a coffee shop in Harvard Square and talked about the collapse. He admitted that maybe he, like so many others, got carried away with his ambition for Opera Boston, a company that had no endowment, no broad financial support, no real security blanket.
“Know thyself,’’ he said. “We may not have understood who we were. Maybe we didn’t realize we should have stopped our growth and hung out a while and taken stock before looking to move forward so fast.’’
