Legislature May Eliminate Arts Council, Director Fears : Budget: Legislators eye agency’s $14.6 million in state funds, Joanne Kozberg says. ‘We like to think that the arts are part of the solution to California’s problems.’

The Legislature may eliminate the California Arts Council, a decision that could doom many of the arts organizations dependent on the $13 million in grants the council distributes, CAC Executive Director Joanne Kozberg said Wednesday.

Kozberg said that budget committees seeking to mitigate the state’s $10.7-billion deficit will be meeting this week to examine the 1993 budget “line item by line item,” and have targeted the council’s $14.6 million in state funds.

Kozberg said she could not predict when legislators would make their decision. “If the budget were a classic textbook situation, it would have been given to the governor on June 15,” she said. “And July 1 is a critical juncture because that marks the end of our fiscal year.”

In recent months, two bills that included provisions to eliminate the arts council had been proposed by the Legislature but were not passed. State lawmakers also proposed disbanding the council last July during discussions of the 1992 budget but instead trimmed the CAC budget by about 6%.

“There are a lot of hard choices, and a lot of very significant programs are going to be affected,” Kozberg said. She added that she hoped that the legislators would effect across-the-board cuts in state programs, rather than eliminating individual programs.

“We like to think that the arts are part of the solution to California’s problems,” Kozberg said. “This would eliminate state funds to artists, but more importantly, we really are the catalyst to, conservatively, $23 million in private-sector funds.

“There have been several very, very bad years for arts organizations, and our statistics are showing that more and more organizations are going into deficit situations,” Kozberg said. “That, coupled with the decline in private support for the arts . . . could doom a lot of the state’s arts resources.”

Kozberg said that California’s arts spending decisions have not been influenced by recent controversies over government arts spending at the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to state funds, the council receives about $1.2 million in federal funds from the NEA.