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"Arts Funding: How low can Missouri go?"
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Arts funding: How low can Missouri go?
State ranks 49th in per capita spending
By ROBERT TRUSSELL
The Kansas City Star - March 19, 2006
“You have well- intentioned people who are artistically inclined, and they present (the arts) almost like castor oil: ‘This is good for you.’ ”
David Oliver, chairman of the Arts Council of Metropolitan Kansas City
Charles Salanski was explaining how it had come to this.
Salanski, a retired businessman from St. Joseph, was telling his fellow Missouri Arts Council board members how the state arts agency had fallen on such hard times.
MAC, which claims to be the second oldest state arts council in the country, was once hailed for its innovative approach to arts funding. In the ’90s the legislature routinely appropriated budgets between $4.5 million and $5.6 million for the arts council. Now the agency is limping along on less than $500,000 a year.
It has become one of the poorest arts councils in the country.
Its main job — handing out grants to arts organizations across the state — has been severely diminished. The administrative staff has left jobs unfilled. The monthly newsletter is now published only in electronic form. And the council has had to use money from its endowment, called the Missouri Cultural Trust, to help cover operating expenses.
At one point in his presentation, Salanski held up a brochure produced by Missouri Citizens for the Arts, a lobbying group. Everyone in the room could see the big red number at the top of the brochure: 49.
“We are 49th out of 50,” Salanski said. “As long as we’re 49th, we’re not going anywhere.”
It’s a fact. If you compare how much money the Missouri legislature appropriates for the arts council with other states, the Show-Me State ranks 49th in per capita spending for the arts, according to a study issued in January by the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies.
Missouri ranks even lower in another table contained in the study. Its current budget of $485,000 places it in the bottom six of 56 states, territories and protectorates. The others are Montana ($406,356), the Virgin Islands ($309,568), Guam ($266,577), Northern Marianas ($260,000) and American Samoa ($44,000).
If you take into account the money the council gets each year from the National Endowment for the Arts and the revenue the legislature pays into the cultural trust, then things look a little better. Still, being ranked near the bottom of the heap is a bitter pill for arts advocates.
“I am embarrassed to be in a state that is 49th in funding for the arts,” attorney David Oliver told the group.
Oliver, chairman of the Arts Council of Metropolitan Kansas City, tends to view the arts council’s diminished stature personally. His uncle was Lyman Field, a noted Kansas City lawyer. In the ’60s, Field and painter Thomas Hart Benton, among others, successfully lobbied state lawmakers to create the arts council. Oliver sketches a picture of the well-liked Field and the populist, pipe-smoking Benton plying legislators with bourbon and talking their language in face-to-face meetings.
The problem, Oliver said last week, is that there’s virtually nobody who could do that now. The arts community has grown increasingly out of touch with the people who have the final say on state arts funding.
“I think the arts community and the legislators haven’t kept up the relationship that they need,” he said. “And that’s as much on the arts community’s shoulders as the legislators’.”
Once a year arts advocates converge on Jefferson City for “Citizens Day” and make the rounds, pressing the flesh with lawmakers in a series of short meetings that may last 20 minutes if they’re lucky. But aside from Kyna Iman, lobbyist with Missouri Citizens for the Arts, and Cristina Garcia, the group’s executive director, arts advocates at the Capitol become largely invisible for the rest of the year.
“You have well-intentioned people who are artistically inclined, and they present (the arts) almost like castor oil: ‘This is good for you,’” Oliver said.
The intent of the brochure was to hammer a different argument: The arts are important to the economy. It was researched and designed by Marie Hunter, director of the Office of Cultural Affairs for Columbia.
“It’s not just us saying, ‘Oh, the arts are important,’” Hunter said. “That’s a true statement, but there’s a lot of numbers to back up that argument. …
“Certainly no one is making the argument that we should fund the arts council over mental health services. But we need to be mindful of the big picture. If you eliminate state funding for the arts, you eliminate access and you eliminate resources. You take away a whole layer of support (for arts organizations).”
Despite the arts council’s longevity, few lawmakers know much about its history.
Sen. Charlie Shields, a St. Joseph Republican, sits on the board of the Missouri Cultural Trust. He said the turnover among lawmakers in the last 10 years is a major hurdle for arts advocates.
“One of the problems we’ve got is that nobody in the House was there when the cultural trust was established, and they don’t know the history of it,” Shields said. “So we need a lot of communication to educate them. The cultural trust itself was difficult enough to explain to legislators who were there to vote on it.”
Pitching the arts in terms of economic development is the key, Shields said. (The council is, in fact, part of the Department of Economic Development.)
“I think the old-school thought … was that when you try to relocate a business here you offer every tax abatement under the sun,” Shields said. “But the reality now is that everyone is offering the same tax package.”
That leaves what Shields called “the intangibles,” such as an enhanced quality of life made possible by the arts.
There’s a chance Missouri could move up in the rankings come July 1, the start of the next fiscal year. But that depends on the legislature. In his budget recommendation, Gov. Matt Blunt called for pumping $500,000 into the council’s budget and $3.3 million into the cultural trust. But once the state budget goes through the committee process and floor debate, money for the arts may be far less than Blunt’s recommendation. That’s what happened last year.
The council, meanwhile, is looking for ways to redefine its purpose. The majority of the 14 members have been on the council less than a year. Most of them had no idea of the fiscal problems they would encounter when they accepted the appointments. At the Kansas City meeting they voted to take a “strategic look at who we are” and what the council’s mission should be.
One question that will surely be considered is whether the arts council could seek private funding instead of relying solely on state revenue.
As chairman Mike Vangel of Columbia put it, “We can either put our eggs in the state’s basket and live or die by the money the legislature appropriates, or we can at least investigate some alternatives.”
