Costa Mesa Lists Arts Cutbacks

One-on-one music workshops for highschool students, plays staged for elementary school students and classical music presentations for senior citizens will be pared in the wake of the City Council’s vote last week to cut in half its allocation for arts grants.

Because the city requires that arts grants be used for community outreach projects, cultural groups say they will be forced to whittle away at programs they have spent years developing in local schools and community centers.

The City Council approved a cut from $175,000 to $87,500 in the amount that will go to arts groups in 1992-93. The action was taken after several budget cutting measures failed to offset a projected $3.7-million revenue shortfall this year, with another anticipated $2-million shortfall next fiscal year.

City officials have not determined how much individual arts grants will be reduced, indicating only that some may face larger cuts than others, so that smaller groups most reliant on city money would not be devastated.

Costa Mesa awarded grants totaling $175,000 to 16 arts groups for 1991-92. They range from the tiny Costa Mesa Art League, which received 95% of its total outreach budget of $10,050 from the city, to the Orange Coast College Foundation, which gets slightly more than 1% of its outreach budget of $1.2 million from Costa Mesa.

Until the city determines who gets what next year--a decision due by the time the fiscal year begins July 1--arts groups can only speculate about what changes might be in store.

“If the Costa Mesa grant is not available to us, then the programs that we’ve developed for the city will probably not be performed,” said Louis G. Spisto, executive director of the Pacific Symphony, which received a $4,700 grant from the city this year for music workshops in Newport-Mesa Unified School District high schools.

In those workshops, Pacific Symphony musicians pair up with Newport-Mesa School District high school musicians for one-on-one instructional sessions. The program has proven more productive--and cost-efficient--than full orchestral performances, Spisto said. Any cuts in its city grant would mean fewer sessions for students, he said.

Spisto and others Costa Mesa grant recipients said they will seek money from other sources in hopes of continuing their programs. The Pacific Symphony, for example, will apply for the first time for funding from Newport Beach to try to make up for the grant reduction from Costa Mesa, since the Newport-Mesa school district extends into both cities.

“I think what none of us knows is the ultimate impact of this cut,” said Richard Owens, managing director of Opera Pacific, which is putting on 350 outreach performances in schools throughout Orange County for 1991-92, for which it received a $17,800 city arts grant. Opera Pacific also spends a week at the Marion Parsons Special Education Center in Costa Mesa, performing for developmentally disabled students as well as helping them put on their own performances.

“We’re all speculating at this moment, but we’re all feeling discouraged that this is happening in Costa Mesa of all places,” Owens said.

Arts on the Green, an annual two-day showcase for Costa Mesa performing and visual arts groups sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce, receives one-third of its annual budget from the city, said festival co-chairman Ted Baker. He speculated that if funding is not in place by the end of the summer, the event may be canceled this year.

“We could say, ‘Hey, it’s not worth it,’ ” said Baker, who also is dean of fine arts at Orange Coast College. “But I suspect that at least through June or July we’ll still be working on it.”

Irene Hajek, chairman of the city’s Cultural Arts Committee, said she will take a harder look at various groups’ outreach programs to see whether they justify continuing subsidies from the city.

“We have a couple of groups there that we are a little skeptical about how much they have been a benefit to Costa Mesa,” she said, though she would not identify those groups.

Besides the arts-grant reductions, the city also halved grants to community service organizations and civic groups. City departments, such as police, fire and city administration, took a 6.9% cut.