Council OKs 3-Part Arts Fund Plan : Subsidies: Garden Grove’s action creates a monetary pool of as much as $100,000 for organizations to draw from.

The City Council on Tuesday unanimously approved a three-pronged plan to provide a permanent subsidy for local arts groups, reversing its stance of previous years.

The plan will create a funding pool of as much as $100,000 from which arts groups will be able to draw, with the lion’s share expected to go to the Grove Shakespeare Festival and the Orange County Symphony of Garden Grove, Assistant City Manager Mike Fenderson said Wednesday.

The council agreed to allow city arts groups to tap an existing arts-in-public-places fund generated through developer fees. It has averaged $3,000 a month in years past, though because of the recession it has been below that level in recent months, according to Cal Rietzel, community services manager.

Along with the council’s previously outlined plans to set aside revenue from advertising on new bus stop shelters throughout the city, as well as a portion of a building-permit surcharge, the vote established a three-tiered funding source for the arts.

The council also approved the formation of a commission to allocate the money to arts groups. The new nine-member Community Services and Arts Commission will replace the old Art in Public Places Committee and Community Services Commission and could be in place by year’s end, said Fenderson.

The turnaround arrives the same year that a previous council’s three-year phase-out of the Grove’s city arts subsidies would have been completed, leaving the organization scrambling for new donors. The disappearance of city money is one component of a $125,000-plus deficit currently facing the Grove Shakespeare Festival.

Tuesday’s decision was greeted with enthusiasm by arts officials.

“With this new commission, I think the process will now be more legitimate and less like beggary,” Yaakov Dvir-Djerassi, general manager of the Orange County Symphony of Garden Grove, said Wednesday.

“I just want to be sure this committee will deal with topics that are arts-oriented. When other items, like soccer teams and social services, start leaking in, it makes it more difficult (for the arts) because we always have to feed the hungry. . . . Sometimes these boards overextend the concept of what culture is.”