Construction at the site of Toby’s Dinner Theatre in Columbia is under way to create Howard County’s New Cultural Center. The theater, a mainstay in Columbia for 45 years, will remain open and will be replaced by a 340-seat dinner theater by spring 2026.

Dinner theater operations will be shifted to Columbia Center for the Theatrical Arts, a nonprofit, that will run shows and community programs.

Howard County’s New Cultural Center is a $68 million project and is one of five buildings planned as part of the 2010 Downtown Columbia Plan, meant to foster economic development in performing and visual arts while making more workforce housing available, according to a county news release.

“The New Cultural Center will be an exciting epicenter for dynamic visual and performing arts, not only for Downtown Columbia but throughout our county and region. Building upon the legacy of Toby’s Dinner Theatre, this new public amenity will bring together arts, culture, education and recreation opportunities for residents of all incomes and ages,” Howard County Executive Calvin Ball said in the news release.

When planning a trip to see a show at Toby’s, there are some new travel details visitors should keep in mind. It is suggested, if traveling from Route 29 south, to take the Broken Land Parkway exit and drive through the Merriweather District to the theater. If traveling on Route 29 north, drivers can use exit 18 and the recently opened jug handle exit ramp to get right onto Symphony Woods Road.

The New Cultural Center was one of five buildings included in the 2010 Downtown Columbia Plan, a 30-year master plan to revitalize and redevelop Downtown Columbia. The facility will include partnerships with Columbia Center for the Theatrical Arts, the Howard County Arts Council and the Howard County Housing Commission as it will feature mixed-income housing. After the dinner theater is complete in spring 2026, a 200-seat Children’s Theater and Blackbox Theater, which will be run by CCTA and the arts council, respectively, will be next. An arts council-curated public arts gallery, a CCTA-programmed dance studio and classroom space for arts education are all set to be complete by spring 2028.

Under the 2016 Downtown Columbia Development Rights and Responsibilities Agreement, which makes the Howard County Housing Commission responsible for building more than 700 units of mixed-income housing in the area, the cultural center will also include 174 mixed-income housing units. The Columbia Downtown Housing Corporation has invested $3.5 million to help provide 87 units, according to the county release.

While work on the center has begun, some County Council members had raised opposition to the project during a meeting in November when the county was in the closing phase for the project. Then-council Chair Deb Jung went as far as calling the project a “complete boondoggle,” as it had been “over budget, behind schedule and unnecessary” from its conception.

Jung supported putting the $68 million toward other options, such as the construction of a new central branch of the Howard County Library System. Then-council Vice Chair Liz Walsh and District 5 council member David Yungman agreed with the idea. Yungman argued that the ideas behind the center should be added to the single-use library to “supercharge” the library project, making it more “palatable” and potentially advancing it more quickly.

It’s “insane” that for the size of the cultural center budget, the only public benefits the county will see are the gallery and the public theater, Walsh said. The $68 million shouldn’t be spent on a dinner theater, she argued.

However, in January, Ball said the library and cultural center projects couldn’t be combined because they have separate funding and plans. Partners such as Toby’s Dinner Theatre are separate from a library, and the affordable housing units with the cultural center add another complexity, he said.

“And the funding there, the low-income housing tax credits, it just would not at all be feasible to combine two projects that have been moving along for, in some respects, almost a decade, if not more,” Ball said.

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