ARTS AGENCIES AWAITING FINAL WORD ON BUDGET

With an eye on Washington, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies convened here for its annual conference Thursday, still awaiting final budget figures for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Museum Services.

There were preliminary indications, however, that the arts were faring well in the closed House-Senate conference meetings.

Although tentative agreements appear to have placed the endowments and Museum Services at budget levels close to fiscal 1986--prior to the mandatory 4.3% cut March 1 under the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings budget-balancing law--a source close to Rep. Sidney R. Yates (D-Ill.), chairman of this year’s Appropriations interior subcommittee conference, cautioned that it’s “still possible” the numbers could change for the new fiscal year that began Oct. 1.

The final budgets are not expected to be available until today or Tuesday.

At a reception Wednesday night at the Minneapolis fine-arts complex, where delegates watched a performance at the Children’s Theatre Company, Anne Murphy, executive director of the American Arts Alliance, said she was “a little nervous” at the length of time the budget process was taking.

“Three days for a conference that normally takes three hours! This is a tough one, but that’s the way everything has been this year,” Murphy said.

The chief lobbyist for the arts did allow, however, that if she were really troubled by the eventual outcome she would have stayed in Washington and not attended the sessions of the states’ arts advocates, who meet in conjunction with the states arts agencies.

For the first five months of fiscal 1986 (Oct. 1-March 1), the arts endowment received $165.7 million; the humanities endowment got $138.6 million and Museum Services received $21.4 million, despite efforts by the Reagan Administration to virtually eliminate the museum agency.

Meanwhile, the 400 delegates gathered here anxiously await an address today by NEA Chairman Frank Hodsoll announcing sweeping changes he plans in the blue-chip “challenge grant” program. There were strong hints that his remarks may generate the kind of controversy this year that proposed changes in the arts-in-education program caused at last year’s convention in Seattle.

With a compromise last May that accommodated both the arts agencies’ concerns about artist residencies and the endowment’s goals of a basic, sequential course of arts education, Hodsoll appears to have resolved the issue to the satisfaction of most delegates here.

Whether he can do the same with the challenge grant issue remains to be seen.

The new program, scheduled to be introduced next October on a pilot basis, is called Challenge III. Instead of funding institutions, the endowment now wants to use challenge money to support projects that work to achieve “long-term, national excellence in the arts, or access to, and appreciation of” the arts while enhancing non-federal support.

Challenge grants range from a low of about $50,000 to a top of $1 million.

With an estimated $18 million pot in challenge-grant money--the same as for fiscal ’86 in an era of “flat” budgets--the endowment appears to be sticking to its three-to-one match requirement rather than a modified approach, which the national assembly leadership favors.

Robin Tryloff, board chair of the state arts agencies assembly and director of the Nebraska Arts Council, is calling for a “more flexible” approach, which she insists was Congress’ intention.

At the opening session of the assembly in the plush, two-year-old Ordway Theatre, which is the new home of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, she voiced concern that arts agencies might not be able to compete with such a “rigid” match.

But Anthony B. Turney, deputy director to Hodsoll for public partnership, stated that the three-to-one match was needed to assure a particular program’s success.

This is an arts conference surrounded by art. In public buildings in Minnesota’s state capital, one can hear piped-in classical music. Even in the assembly’s hospitality suite, there are paintings and a hanging quilt done by Minnesota artists.

And Wednesday night, the state arts agency assembly was greeted by Minnesota Gov. Rudy Perpich who boasted that his is “the first in the Union” to insist that a certain amount ($2.25) be set aside per pupil for arts education.

And Leonard Nadasdy, chairman of the Minnesota State Arts Board, and a Republican, noted that the governor, a Democrat, is “nonpartisan” in his appointments to the arts board. “And there aren’t too many states that can say that,” Nadasdy noted.