A New, Improved Grants Program for Los Angeles : Grants: Changes are designed to involve artists--not politicians--in the L.A. Endowment for the Arts funding process.

In an attempt to strengthen the involvement of artists and arts professionals--and not politicians--in divvying up the city’s growing Los Angeles Endowment for the Arts, the L.A. Cultural Affairs Department has made several major changes in its grants program.

The changes, which also attempt to address the different needs of individual artists, large organizations and smaller, less established groups, will be announced on Friday and include new grant categories, a specified point system for judging applicants, an appeals process and a revised makeup of the peer panels which vote on the city’s arts funding.

While the changes are the result of a seven-month study on administering the Los Angeles Endowment for the Arts, one of the revisions--a system in which peer panels will also rank unfunded applicants in case extra funding later becomes available--should help guard against criticism such as recently hit the department when it awarded $350,000 outside of the normal review process.

In that instance, administrative discretion was quietly used to fund several organizations, including some that were denied grants by recently convened peer panels. The department says the awards were made when surplus money was added to the endowment budget after the panels--comprised of artists and arts professionals within each discipline--had already disbanded.

The changes go into effect with the 1991-92 Cultural Grants Program. About 12,000 application forms with detailed instructions and descriptions of the changes will be mailed to Los Angeles artists next week, and an estimated $3.3 million will be awarded in nine arts disciplines on June 15, 1991.

“This is the first fruit of the whole reorganization that we’ve been working on for the last couple of years,” said Adolfo V. Nodal, general manager of the Cultural Affairs Department. Nodal administers the evolving endowment, an arts funding package which was approved by the City Council in November 1988 and is now operating on $5.8 million from the city’s general fund.

“These changes deal with some of the issues that have confronted us, things like the idea of apples and oranges, and trying to compare large, established organizations with smaller, community-based groups,” Nodal said. “And an important thing the changes do is strengthen our standing on conflict of interest issues.”

Perhaps the biggest change is the complete revision of grant categories. Instead of the former categories for established organizations, fledgling groups and individual artists, grants will now be divided between two grant programs: institutional advancement and community arts.

Artistic merit will be the main criteria for judging Institutional Advancement Program grants, which will be for organizations whose main concern is “advancing their art forms.” Individual artists will not be eligible in that category.

The Community Arts Program will be for individual artists, arts organizations and social service groups. In addition to artistic merit, heavy emphasis will be placed on need, cultural diversity, and the social or educational benefit of proposed projects.

Within those two grant programs, the department has also added a new discipline category--Urban and Design Arts.

In the past, Nodal said, there has been “no vehicle for the design community to express themselves within the city plan.” Now eligible for grants will be projects in architecture, graphic design, landscape design and other design arts.

An important change, Nodal said, will be to make the endowment’s all-important peer panels “completely conflict-of-interest free.” Whereas panel members associated with grant applicants were allowed to serve in the past as long as they abstained from discussing the grant in question, no one with any connection to applicants--such as board or staff members or spouses of board or staff members--will now be permitted.

Nodal admitted that it would be “really tough” to find the five or six qualified experts and artists needed in each discipline, because usual panel members such as members of the city’s larger arts organizations would almost always be ineligible.

But, he said, the new system would encourage the department to “get some new blood into the process and get some of the people involved that have been disenfranchised in the past.” New areas to be tapped into include the educational system and under-represented communities.

In addition, each panel will now have one member from outside of Los Angeles, which Nodal said would lend even more autonomy to the review process.

In yet another attempt to increase fairness, the department is establishing its first formal appeals process. Grounds for appeal will be technicalities such as insufficient information or a panel’s failure to follow established review procedures. Aesthetic disagreements will not be considered for appeal.

Considering appeals will be one function of the department’s new Allocations Committee, a standing committee to be composed of Nodal, the Cultural Affairs Commission president, two commission members, three peer panel chairs and a member of the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission.

A main job of the committee will be to determine how much of the city’s funding pot will go to each discipline.

He said the new committee will also deal with all “special circumstances” that arise outside of the peer panel process, such as “things that somehow fell through the cracks of the grants panel process.” He said this would not apply to groups turned down by the peer panels (except in the case of won appeals), but might be used for organizations that missed funding deadlines, for instance.

“I’m really proud of these new guidelines,” said Nodal. “These changes, especially with the peer panels, will make us one better than the (National) Endowment. We’re trying to rethink how the arts are funded, and we’re looked to as a leader in this.”

The changes in the L.A. grants program were recommended in a preliminary 50-page study commissioned a year ago by the Cultural Affairs Department. The final study by the Massachusetts-based Wolf Organization will be completed next month.

Nodal said the department plans to incorporate most of the 31 recommendations in the $100,000 study, including future changes such as establishing special grants programs in 1992-93 for public art and cultural heritage projects.

But one of the major recommendations that will not be followed, Nodal said, deals with the currently controversial issue of funding for individual artists.

“They recommended that we get out of individual artist funding, and that’s something we simply can not accept,” Nodal said. “We’ve just gotten started on funding for individual artists. We’re a leader in this right now. It’s a real priority for us.”

In the study, the Wolf group recommended that the city help individual artists by awarding grants to organizations that provide artist fellowships. The study cites several reasons for this, including that “works created by individual artists can be controversial and can bring negative publicity to the agency and city officials who appropriate funds” and that “some critics see (grants to individuals) as a veiled public welfare program in which the recipients . . . do not merit public assistance.”

The application deadline for 1991-92 Cultural Grants is Oct. 9. The Cultural Affairs Department is holding a dozen workshops to explain the new procedures and help artists and organizations complete their grants. For times and dates, call the department’s grants office at (213) 620-8635.