2 Join Panel to Overhaul Arts Funding : Grants: The 22-member committee will analyze the program that awards more than half of state council’s aid budget.

Orange County arts leaders Charles Desmarais and Harvey Stearn have been appointed to an ad hoc study group slated to revamp the California Arts Council’s largest grant program.

Desmarais, director of the Laguna Art Museum, and Stearn, an Irvine developer and arts council member, will serve on the new, 22-member panel to recommend major changes to the council’s Organizational Support Program, which awards about $7.5 million annually, or more than half of the agency’s grant budget.

The panel will analyze all facets of the program and over the course of a year, “recommend a complete overhaul,” council Director Robert H. Reid said Friday.

Issues to be discussed include: whether prospective grantees’ artistic mettle and community outreach efforts should be evaluated by a single peer panel instead of separately as they are now; the success of the peer-panel system overall; and how funding should be alloted for small, mid-size and large-budget arts organizations, Reid said.

Desmarais said he will “want to look very carefully” at whether the council is beginning to allocate more money for smaller groups than larger organizations.

“I want to be sure that our major organizations continue to receive the support they need to serve the large number of people they serve in California,” he said.

Most other members of the new, volunteer study group will be announced at the council’s meeting Friday in Los Angeles. Two other council members, Consuelo Santos Killins and Chairwoman Joanne C. Kozberg, have already been named along with three council staff members.

The panel’s first meeting is scheduled for March in San Francisco.