Finally: the county is taking steps to address how arts and cultural agencies receive public funding.
It’s been a rough few years for the arts in general. As government and school budgets are slashed, money appropriated to the arts (and arts education) is often the first to be re-assigned, or at least the first to be suggested for de-funding. A heated debate over whether not-for-profit arts and cultural organizations should receive government funding enjoyed a long run last year following NPR’s firing of Juan Williams.
Not to mention last year’s quick, not-so-quiet crumbling of the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra.
We appreciate our arts and cultural resources, and we know that thousands of our neighbors do, too. And like many of them, we struggle with whether it’s appropriate for taxpayers to indirectly fund the operating budgets of arts and cultural organizations that we may or may not have any interest in funding.
It’s an easy topic to ignore when the budgets are bloated. It’s also a topic that’s been on our mind for months, and we were curious to see how County Executive Joanie Mahoney would deal with the issue in her 2012 county budget proposal.
And overall, we were pleased with the plan. Mahoney announced a new initiative in her tentative budget that nearly 22 percent of room occupancy tax revenues will go directly to fund authorized agencies (arts and cultural line items). The move funnels a specific, steady percentage of revenues into a funding pool available to those agencies that is directly impacted by how well the programming offered by those agencies draws tourism dollars into the county.
The less money that out-of-towners pay to rent rooms, the smaller that pool of available money will be. Not only that, but agencies seeking county dollars will have to raise half the money needed through outside sources before making their case for the remaining half to the county legislature.
In our view, this is a bigger issue than whether or not the county continues to help fund, for example, JazzFest. How we as a community deal with this topic is indicative of how we’ll solve other long-term funding issues, and finding a compromise that encourages and rewards groups for weaning themselves off public funding is a good start.
