Council Creates Commission to Coordinate Funding of the Arts

The City Council on Tuesday voted unanimously to establish a 15-member commission charged with recommending how to divvy up nearly $4 million in hotel taxes among San Diego arts groups.

The change serves to organize what most people around City Hall agree is a disorganized system of doling out public funds to local artists and cultural institutions.

In establishing the city’s Cultural Arts Commission, which will become effective July 1, the council also approved a $210,000 annual staffing increase of four people to provide administrative support for the new group and to lobby for additional state and federal funds for San Diego’s arts.

“It’s been a long time coming,” said Sylvia M’Lafi Thompson, cultural affairs officer for the Educational Cultural Complex, a campus of the San Diego Community College District. “What it means for the city is that, for a change, we can have a unified artistic base.”

Thompson and 16 other San Diegans with ties to the local arts community served on a special city task force that was created in late 1986 to study how city government could streamline the way it gives money to cultural endeavors.

A Hodgepodge Approach

Currently, arts groups and cultural institutions can receive funds in three ways: They can petition the city manager’s office, which in turn gives the application to council members. They can make an appeal to the city’s Public Arts Advisory Board. Or they can go to COMBO, a nonprofit organization that has been used by the city as a middleman in making arts grants. Last year, for instance, COMBO (Combined Arts and Education Council of San Diego County) received $850,000 to redistribute to its member agencies.

The hodgepodge approach has created problems, Deputy City Manager Jack McGrory told council members Monday.

“It is fragmented and it has resulted in some confusion in the arts community,” he said.

The commission, council members hope, will end the confusion and provide a united front for funding the arts. Representatives from arts groups agreed, and encouraged the council to funnel even more money into artistic endeavors.

“Please don’t form this commission and hope that it finds its way on its own,” said Wesley Brustad, executive director of the San Diego Symphony. “It will not work.

“You must feed it, you must inject life into and throw it into our very aesthetic fiber. It’s about money, ladies and gentlemen--the arts. If you truly seek quality and the excellence of big-league standards, they are expensive.”

Only mild criticism of the new commission was offered Monday, and that came from people tied to COMBO. Dr. Peter Frank, a COMBO board member, said he objected to commission members being political appointees.

“Let’s face it,” Frank said. “If you have an organization that is essentially run through the mayor’s office and the city manager’s office, where the appointees are made by public figures, how do you avoid the taint of a political organization?

“That’s very difficult to do. I hope you can do it. I pray you can do that because that can get you into an awful lot of trouble.”

15-Member Commission

Under the ordinance approved Monday, the mayor’s office will appoint seven commissioners. The eight council members will fill the remaining eight spots; each council member will submit three names to the mayor, and she will pick one of the three for each seat.

Council members were unanimous in their support of the commission, but spent most of their time debating how the new city agency should be staffed.

Under the ordinance, a new administrator and secretary will be added to both the mayor’s and city manager’s office to work with the commission. The mayor’s new cultural arts administrator will be responsible for hunting down new state and federal grants; the new city manager post will be responsible for the internal operation of the commission.