Death of Arts Alliance Fits a Pattern : It’s Long Past Time for the County’s Spending on the Arts to Open a Gap on Fargo, N.D.

“L ook to the private sector.”

If Orange County has a battle cry, that’s it. As the Valhalla of private enterprise, this county, as a rule, views government subsidies with as much affection as it would forced busing of Libyan death squads into neighborhood nursery schools.

In the local arts community, the folks behind the Orange County Performing Arts Center provided a glittering example to the rest of the country of just how much could be accomplished without government handouts by building the $73.3-million facility without a nickel from Uncle Sam--or Uncle Duke.

Historically, the county Board of Supervisors has had official--if non-financial--ties to just one arts group: the Orange County Arts Alliance, which recently voted to dissolve itself at the end of this month because it has never done what it set out to.

In a climate where Boy Scouts pledge to be thrifty, brave, clean and privately funded, where the notion of “tax-supported” anything ranks as the eighth deadly sin, maybe the alliance’s demise should come as no big surprise.

When the alliance was created in 1974, the idea was to promote and support the arts countywide. The supervisors designated the alliance as the official arts planning agency for the county in 1980; they just never gave it a budget to plan anything with.

For that, the alliance turned to the California Arts Council, which doled out grants of $12,000 to $30,000 to it each year, with which the group managed to afford one part-time staff member.

The timing of the alliance’s death is particularly ironic, because just a couple of weeks earlier, the Los Angeles City Council approved a plan that will generate $24.4 million in city money for the arts, about five times more than its Cultural Affairs Department has ever been granted.

The comparisons between Los Angeles and Orange County are instructive. Los Angeles, with its population of 3.3 million, has an annual budget of $2.9 billion, which equates to $862.71 per resident; Orange County, with 2.2 million residents, has a budget of $2 billion, or per-capita spending of $893.65.

On that front, we are not that far behind our neighbor to the north--until it comes to the arts. By siphoning off $24.4 million to the arts from developer fees, hotel taxes and other sources, Los Angeles will now be setting aside an average of $7.26 per person to make the city a more hospitable place for arts to grow, the fourth-highest per-capita arts spending in the country. (Los Angeles County, just in case you are wondering, has allotted about $26 million for various arts spending in its 1988-89 budget of $9 billion.)

Orange County’s budget has nothing--zip, nada --directly devoted to arts support, promotion, education or appreciation.

That’s pretty embarrassing. I don’t know where that puts us in national rankings, but it is budgetary light years away from such major arts centers as New York and San Francisco. I have a feeling it leaves us somewhere below Boise, Ida., and Fargo, N.D.

Over the years the supervisors have made individual grants to several groups by tapping personal discretionary budgets or revenue-sharing money. But as far as having an ongoing policy of arts support--the county doesn’t.

The only sign the county has given toward future arts support of any kind was a move to establish a panel to explore the use of art in some form at John Wayne Airport, because so many people go through it.

Is there more the county should be doing? Some local arts leaders think so.

“It is quite appropriate for municipal, county, state and federal governments to support the arts,” said Kevin Consey, director of the Newport Harbor Art Museum. “I think arts support is as legitimate a role for government to play as road building, defense, etc., etc.”

David Emmes, producing artistic director at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, said: “At least philosophically, there is a role for the county to play. At this time in our development as a county, with all the recent events and growing interest in arts, perhaps now is a very appropriate time in the county to examine that role. At least they are looking at how arts could become part of John Wayne Airport, and that is to be applauded, but it could be done on an even larger scale.”

“Our experience,” said Tom Bradac, producing artistic director of the Grove Theatre Company in Garden Grove, “has been that the private sector does even better when the public sector--the government--leads the way (and) shows that government feels there is importance in more than just bricks and mortar. . . . All the arts contribute to the overall well-being of society and to the ability for all of us . . . to raise our standard of living.”

The point is not that anyone is asking the county to try to put us magically on a par with New York, Paris or London. Or even Los Angeles. But given the cultural leaps the county has made in the last 10 years--with the Performing Arts Center, South Coast Repertory, Newport Harbor and Laguna art museums, the Grove Theatre Company and other groups--this region has the makings of a diverse, vigorous arts scene.

But to develop that takes money. With the Arts Alliance disbanding because of lack of interest and image problems, there is no indication that the county will not continue to leave all burden of arts support with--that’s right--the private sector.

It seems, in parlance appropriate to this day, that the county is giving the old “bah humbug!” to the arts.

It is time for the county to formally (and financially) recognize that growth and kick in some dough, although given the county’s current money crunch, that is about as likely as Barry Minkow getting approval for a new-car loan.

“I think it’s a great idea,” Supervisor Thomas F. Riley said. “But getting the money out of the budget is the killing point right now. . . . We are trying to balance the budget, making an effort not to lay people off, provide for the homeless; there are a lot of demands on our budget resources. But if we want (Orange County) to remain the best place to live, these are areas we must continue to be aggressive about.”

Is the county, as some suggest, simply too young to warrant any significant county arts support? It took Los Angeles 24 years after the opening of a major music center to provide what it did at last month’s City Council meeting.

“I would hope that we could reach that state of enlightenment sooner, without having to reinvent all the wheels that it took Los Angeles to get where it is,” SCR’s Emmes said.

For less than the cost of a McD.L.T. lunch (with soft drink and fries) per Orange County resident, the county could take a respectable step toward acknowledging that music, theater, dance and art are sorta valuable and appreciated here.

Privately speaking, is that too much to ask?