Panel to Study How the Arts Pump Up County’s Economy : Funding: Impact reports have been valuable tools across the U.S. to help make a case for increased public support by demonstrating financial benefits to communities. L.A., for example, reaped $5.1 billion in 1985 from the arts, a study found.

The Orange County Business Committee for the Arts is planning a study of the economic impact of the arts.

It would be the first survey of its kind in the county, according to local arts officials. Similar studies elsewhere have been used to show the fiscal benefits of the arts to a community and to help rally more private and public arts funding.

James Doti, a professor of economics at Chapman College who will help the committee with the study, said he hopes to begin work on the review within a month.

A top official of the panel, which is set up as a nonprofit agency that encourages businesses to support local arts organizations, would not discuss the study Tuesday. Asked how the committee plans to pay for the review and when it hopes to release the study, executive director Betty R. Moss would say only that the project “is in the formation stages.”

“We are just not ready at this time to make any public statements,” Moss said, adding that “we don’t want 10,000 calls” about the study.

She said the panel will make a public announcement about the project’s progress after its annual board meeting Feb. 15.

Doti said he is analyzing similar U.S. studies to determine the best method to use and “the breadth and depth” of the local survey.

“We are convinced that such a study would be valuable,” Doti said. “I’d imagine that many policy makers would find it useful to find out how much of our region’s economy is affected by the arts.”

He said he is “assessing” how to keep the costs of the study to “a bare-bones minimum.”

Martin Weil, director of the Committee to Form an Orange County Arts Council, a grass-roots group working to form a countywide arts service agency, said an economic impact report could be “an incredibly valuable tool” to help make a case for local arts funding by demonstrating the financial benefit of the arts to the community at large.

“Such a report can, for example, show how many jobs both directly and indirectly are dependent on arts activity,” and the number of dollars generated by the arts for local businesses, such as restaurants and hotels, said Weil, an independent arts management consultant.

A 1985 study by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce showed that the economic impact of the arts in that city that year totaled $5.1 billion. The study was used by city officials to help gain support for the Los Angeles Endowment for the Arts, a multimillion-dollar program established in 1988 that greatly expanded municipal arts funding.

A similar survey recently issued in San Diego County showed that arts groups pump more than a quarter of a billion dollars into that economy and return $10 to the local community for each $1 contributed.

Roella Hsieh Louie, a grants coordinator for the Los Angeles Endowment for the Arts, warned, however, that an economic-impact study can be too narrow and “elitist.” To fully understand and represent the cultural assets and needs of a community, social and political dynamics as well as economics must be analyzed, she said.

For instance, Orange County arts officials should study “multiculturalism and (the needs) of the area’s emerging ethnic groups,” said Louie, who recently addressed a meeting of the Committee to Form an Orange County Arts Council.