Governor’s Veto Threatens Arts Projects

A statewide playwriting competition sponsored by Costa Mesa’s South Coast Repertory and an electric freeway billboard that would proclaim Long Beach’s cultural attractions were two early victims of Gov. George Deukmejian’s surprise veto Friday of a $1-million matching fund for the arts.

The veto of the California Arts Council’s new California Challenge Program, under which proposals such as the play contest and cultural billboard were to be funded, left arts officials stunned. “Never in a thousand years did we suspect the program was in jeopardy,” said council Director Robert Reid, himself a Deukmejian appointee.

With much fanfare, the council on June 3 had announced the award of $930,000 to 42 organizations statewide, including grants to such Southern California institutions as the Mark Taper Forum and the Long Beach Opera. The balance of the $1 million would have paid for a Sacramento-based administrator.

As the program required recipients to double or triple the grant amount with money from new, private donors, it was considered an exemplar of the Deukmejian Administration’s approach to arts funding and was part of the governor’s initial budget proposal in January. “You make the assumption that if this is part of the governor’s proposed budget, it’s safe,” Reid said.

Arts organizers said they had made the same assumption when notified of the council’s awards, and had budgeted accordingly. Some reacted with agitation when informed that their grants were among the $472 million that Deukmejian had cut from the $44-billion state budget he signed Friday.

“Why commit these funds and take us through this up and down? I’d prefer it if they had never given it to us than to give it to us and take it away,” said Judith Baca, artistic director of the Social and Public Arts Resource Center in Venice. Her $15,000 grant was to have underwritten the “World Wall,” a traveling exhibit of seven 10-by-30-foot painted panels depicting the transformation of the world into a peaceful place.

“I’m just terribly devastated. And I’m angry, too,” Baca said, adding that she had hoped to use part of the money to pay her own salary.

Martin Benson, artistic director of South Coast Repertory, said the Tony-winning theater company’s California Playwrights Festival had been imperiled by the loss of its $42,500 grant.

The festival was to have solicited new plays from California writers, awarding cash prizes to the winners and producing some works on SCR stages.

“We’re all just miserably depressed,” he said. “We wanted to really focus on developing playwrights in California, our home state and all.” Still, he said his company would try to “salvage” the competition by making cutbacks in other areas.

Benson, like many others affected by the veto, complained that the arts were already underfunded by California. At $0.51 per person, California presently ranks 32nd nationwide in arts funding, according to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies.

“The fact that a program as important as this is, with so little cost, has to be lopped off has to be seen as very brutal and short-sighted,” Benson said.

Democratic legislators agreed. “To (Deukmejian) it’s penny-wise, but to anybody familiar with the arts, it’s pound foolish,” said Assemblyman Sam Farr (D-Monterey), vice chairman of the Legislature’s Joint Committee on the Arts. “It was totally vindictive.”

The Republican governor’s deputy finance director, Russ Gould, said that the state’s unexpected revenue shortfall of $1.1 billion had forced his hand. “It was not malice toward the program,” he said, but Deukmejian had determined not to fund new state initiatives this year.

While insisting that their programs had been harmed by the veto, many arts groups said they would likely be able to pull off their projects without the California Challenge money.

Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum, said his project, a multidisciplinary work about Japanese-Americans titled “Sansei”, would probably survive without its $50,000 grant.

But San Diego Freeway commuters will have to do without a conceptual billboard announcing cultural events under way in Long Beach.

The executive director of that city’s Public Corp. for the Arts, Lindsay Shields, said she had intended to use her $25,000 grant for “a wonderful, spectacular idea.”

“It was going to be like the Hollywood Bowl computerized sign, but we were going to have a nationwide contest to design an artsy computerized sign,” she said.

“Oh, that doesn’t sound too good,” she quickly added. “Let’s call it an artistic computerized sign.”