Finger-Pointing Over the S.F. Festival That Failed : Arts: Accountability for the operation of Festival 2000 has become a major issue for many artists and arts administrators.

As in a classic “Who-done-it?” mystery, members of the arts community here are pointing fingers over who’s responsible for the Festival 2000 debacle, the failed $2.3-million multicultural arts program that finished $500,000 in debt.

People want to know if the October festival was overly ambitious in scope and whether the city of San Francisco should have kept tighter reins on executive director Lenwood Sloan and his 20-member staff.

Sloan, who recently left town to take a new job with the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, acknowledged making mistakes. But he said in an interview here that those calling for financial “autopsy reports” are overlooking the festival’s artistic achievements. “The festival cannot be measured from Oct. 6 to 23,” he said, referring to the official run dates.

But he admitted blunders were made. “My mistake, in so far as managing goes, was being blinded by my vision, being focused on the future dividends and not hiring a P.T. Barnum, whose focus would be on getting bodies to the events.”

Accountability for Festival 2000’s operation and budget--$1.8 million raised from the city, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, box office receipts and other sources--has become an overriding issue for many artists and arts administrators.

“Nobody added up the numbers and said, ‘You can’t do this,”’ said Bruce W. Davis, vice president of the San Francisco Arts Democratic Club who has produced many city festivals, including the annual San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival. “No matter how noble your artistic vision is, or righteous the cause is, wishful thinking won’t change the numbers. It looks like nobody asked the question. It almost had the feeling of ‘Our Gang’--’Let’s do a show! Darla, you do the costumes; Spanky, you set up the lights. “‘

Plenty of questions are being asked now, especially after Wednesday’s decision by the festival’s board of directors to declare bankruptcy. Letters to creditors were sent out Thursday and attorney Suzanne Smith filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy on behalf of the nonprofit organization Friday morning. A trustee will liquidate the festival’s assets, estimated to be worth about $75,000, before doling out what little funds there are to creditors, according to Smith.

“We are literally out of business,” said board member Al Wilson.

Two city agencies--the San Francisco Arts Commission and Grants for the Arts Program--have agreed to a $100,000 bail-out of two dozen individuals and arts groups that didn’t receive their full payments for festival participation. But others, including some national arts groups, remain thousands of dollars in the hole.

San Francisco Supervisor Terence Hallinan has called for a Dec. 13 hearing to review how the festival spent the city’s $500,000 seed money. “I’m just after what happened,” he said. “You’d have to say that Mr. Sloan is where the ball stops, or starts. He devoted his energies to the artistic part of it, and no one was around to pick up the other end of it. Somebody should have been checking up on things.”

The supervisor plans to question the role of Kary Schulman, whose agency Grants for the Arts provided Sloan with half-a-million dollars from the city’s hotel occupancy tax fund, seemingly with few strings attached.

Schulman says it is not under her purview to keep tabs on nonprofit groups. “We’re a small office, and we give funding to the arts,” she said. “Had anyone wanted to call us, we would have given advice. But this is not a technical assistance office.”

Sloan said even though the festival lost money, there will be artistic “dividends” from the festival. There has been increased national interest in some of the festival’s artists and performers, such as a visual arts exhibit that will tour the country.

“It was a relay race, and the last runner stumbled,” he said. “The question is, was the race worth it? The focus has been on the money and not on the work. The whole thing has been taken out of context.”

As for his resignation, Sloan said he left San Francisco for the NEA job--which he assumed two weeks earlier than announced--for a simple reason. “I have to pay the rent.” He said he had not been paid by the festival since Oct. 1.

Sloan acknowledged he erred by “not measuring the recessionary climate” and “overreacting to the festival’s initial response from individuals and corporations.” But he also said his work was plagued by politics.

“San Francisco is a political place; no one there operates outside of the politics. I operated by referendum. When the visual artists wanted to be represented, they were and the budget grew by $400,000. The same with a schools component. They were added and the budget grew by $150,000. Right down to the last day, we were hearing, ‘Our community was never asked to participate in the dialogue,’ and ‘We’re being left out.”’

“Everyone wanted to be front stage in this festival,” festival organizer Davis observed. “I guess he loved to say, ‘Yes.’ No is a hard word.”

Schulman said the festival may have grown too big, too fast.

Davis said competing interests, and the battle to stay under budget, comes with the turf.

“The festival was rooted in politics; it started on a political premise, that multicultural arts aren’t getting their just share of the pie. It was almost a mission impossible to keep politics out of it.

“They failed miserably, and at a great cost and grief to people,” he said. “People are angry. San Francisco is proud of the fact that it has one of the strongest professional arts communities in the country. Here was a moment of glory that got covered with mud. We need to figure out what went wrong.”