HOUSE VOTE HOLDS THE LINE AGAINST ARTS AXERS

After a key vote in Congress--and despite Gramm-Rudman budget-balancers--the nation’s arts community is just about halfway home on what it considers to be respectable budgets for the coming fiscal year.

There is still the Senate to contend with.

Voting 359 to 51 to approve the appropriations bill for the Department of Interior and related agencies Thursday night, the House of Representatives brought the fiscal 1987 budgets for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum Services back to where they were before cutbacks under the Gramm-Rudman budget balancing law.

“This bill is an an all-American bill,” said Rep. Sidney R. Yates (D-Ill.), chairman of the subcommittee which prepared the legislation. “It provides the amounts necessary to support the national heritage of all Americans--the public lands, national parks, national forests and the cultural and historic preservation of the heritage that we want to pass on to our children and grandchildren.”

At the same time, Yates headed off a move by Rep. Bill Frenzel (R-Minn.) to reduce the overall $8.2-billion package by taking .7% from each item in the bill to freeze the total at what it was when the first Gramm-Rudman cut came into effect last March. Instead, with his own floor amendment Yates proposed an overall 1% cut bringing the bill slightly under Gramm-Rudman level, but he did his own trimming, which the House overwhelmingly approved. He left the arts untouched.

In the House bill for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, the National Endowment for the Arts is appropriated $165.6 million--$20 million more than the Reagan Administration had proposed; the National Endowment for the Humanities, $138.6 million--$12 million more than the Administration wanted, and the Institute of Museum Services, $21.4 million--or $20 million more; for six years in a row, the Administration has tried to get rid of the museum services agency. The next hurdle comes Wednesday in the Senate Appropriations interior subcommittee. There is a $400-million difference between House and Senate versions. The Senate bill is at $7.8 billion.

The Times has learned that the Senate Appropriations interior subcommittee, during the marking up of individual items in its bill, will propose $159.9 million for NEA, $136.6 million for NEH and $18.9 million for IMS. Presuming passage in the Senate, the differences would have to be resolved in a House-Senate conference in late September. The final totals, said a Senate source, “will probably be somewhere between the two.”

Taking note of the Administration’s stand on the museum agency, the subcommittee report accompanying Yates’ bill noted that “once again the committee rejects the Administration’s proposal to eliminate the Institute of Museum Services.”

As for the arts endowment, the report dismissed the Reagan funding proposal as “inadequate” and repeated the judgment of another report issued more than 20 years ago recommending the establishment of the original National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities: “The panel is motivated by the conviction that the arts are not for a privileged few but for the many, that their place is not at the periphery of society but at the center. . . .”

In the general debate on the Yates subcommittee bill, the only reference to the arts budget came when Frenzel unsuccessfully assailed a 76% increase appropriated to the National Capital Arts and Cultural Affairs program, from $2 million to $3.5 million.

The money is distributed evenly among 10 organizations, including the National Symphony Orchestra, Corcoran Gallery of Art and Arena Stage. “I wouldn’t give ‘em a flat dime,” said Frenzel after casting his vote against the bill.

The National Gallery of Art is treated separately. The Yates bill appropriated $34.6 million--$1 million over the fiscal ’86 level.

A potential fight over an alleged issue of pornography, which came up last year, did not materialize.