Group to Pressure City on Grants : Arts: California Confederation launches a campaign to keep Los Angeles Arts Endowment package at $3 million.

The California Confederation of the Arts, a powerful statewide advocacy group that normally lobbies for statewide arts funding, Monday announced a Los Angeles campaign to maintain the city’s Arts Endowment grants at $3 million.

“We’ll use the model of the same statewide activities we’ve been doing on a city level,” Tarabu Betserai, the confederation’s Southern California field director, told The Times. “We need to educate people and let them know that their success in the budgeting process . . . depends on how much political pressure is applied.”

City Council members have said that the grants program, which distributes about $3 million annually to artists and arts organizations through the Cultural Affairs Department, may be in jeopardy next year because of an estimated $190-million shortfall in the city’s overall 1992-93 budget.

“There are going to be discussions about what should be cut . . . and as we’ve seen in the past, arts and culture tend to be lowest on the priority,” Betserai said.

Betserai announced his lobbying campaign, which includes educational outreach, phone trees, fax networks, letter-writing campaigns and meetings with City Council members, during a Monday night “Arts Congress” at Barnsdall Art Park. Despite torrential rains, more than 100 members of the city’s arts community showed up to discuss the grants program.

The 1,000-member California Confederation of the Arts has previously focused on strengthening ties with legislators in Sacramento and Gov. Pete Wilson. Confederation leaders have thus far been successful with a campaign to keep the 1992-93 state funding for the California Arts Council--despite state budget cuts--at the 1991-92 level of $15.8 million.

The Cultural Affairs Department began its bid to maintain the grants last month when its advisory commission recommended a $3-million grants package for 1992-93, including 252 proposed grants totaling more than $2.7 million, as well as $200,000 for technical assistance to arts groups and $75,000 for grant appeals. The recommendations must pass through lengthy budget reviews ending with mayoral and City Council approval in June.

Cultural Affairs Department General Manager Adolfo Nodal told those at the meeting: “We’ve got a lot of hurdles to cross to keep this program going and keep it funded in the same level. So please keep an eye on it. We’re going to need your help.

“We have to make sure that we demonstrate that the arts are important to this community; we have to show up at all the council meetings . . . and you need to write letters and know the (budgeting) process.”

Monday’s meeting was the first in a series of twice yearly “Arts Congress” meetings planned to foster communication between the arts community and the Cultural Affairs Department. Similar arts congresses met regularly in 1989 during the formation of the grants program.

The grants are funded through the L.A. Endowment for the Arts, which is composed of outside sources such as hotel and motel bed taxes and fees on new developments. It was established by the City Council in 1988. While the fund’s guidelines mandate that it be used for special programs such as the grants and public art projects, the City Council technically could reduce or rescind endowment funding in a tough budget year.