The Word in Arts Funding -- Privatize

He’s a veteran actor-director and he thinks someone’s got it wrong when it comes to money, government and the arts. You’d recognize the face and name, but in this case he prefers to duck. There are enough troubles in his politically correct world.

“Why give the money away? If the government wants to help artists then it should give grants to people who can repay them, just like student loans. Get something back.”

And then he goes one step further.

“Privatize the arts,” he says.

As retired Army Col. Frank Slade, the Al Pacino character in “Scent of a Woman,” exclaimed: Hoooooo-ahh!

A major change in the care and financial feeding of government-involved arts programs is taking place, forever altering the fiscal underpinnings of many of our institutions.

Earlier this month, Gov. Pete Wilson proposed a budget that would change or eliminate certain state functions, in the process threatening the $12-million annual budget of the California Arts Council.

Privatization? Not exactly, but try weaning .

Or try “economic development strategy.”

Or “load shedding.”

Or “going nonprofit.”

Or “alternate sources of funding.”

These words all have been used to describe one basic reality: The public sector is tilting more and more toward the private sector for help and support.

Wilson may not be suggesting the heresy of public facilities like the Music Center being turned over to the Disney Co. or the La Brea Tar Pits being put on the Universal Tour, much as some functions like trash collecting, prisons and schools have in isolated cases been taken over by private companies.

But he’s given indications that if he had his way the arts council would lose half of its current budget and a year later would get nothing more from the state and might have to fend for itself. Shrink or swim.

And that’s how the California Arts Council got into the automobile license plate business . . . and may soon see itself being weaned from state support.

Joanne C. Kozberg, director of the arts council, hopes to see as much as $2 million raised through a new special interest vehicle plate that will be put introduced in mid-February. Other state departments and social-service groups will be doing similar adventures in mobile fund raising.

In effect, a license to live.

Northern California artist Wayne Thiebaud designed the arts council plate. The 3M company is preparing its reflective coat of many colors and Folsom Prison inmates will handle the minting. With 2 million license plates issued annually in California, Kozberg hopes to tap 5% of that market, charging an extra $20 for the new plates the first year through an advertiser-supported marketing campaign.

But that’s not all. There are other “alternative sources of funding,” she says, in this case “derivative products” that might bear the license imprint, such as posters, lithographs, T-shirts and coffee mugs.

But that’s not all, Part 2. The council has begun working with other state agencies such as the tourism folks in developing “cultural passport” campaigns encouraging visitors to come here and sample our concert halls and museums while at the same time getting Southern Californians to tour the north and northerners to head south. She’s helping to put together a series of regional events for artists and tourists, like a “California Countryside” arts festival in the Central Valley and a Gold County springtime festival.

“Arts should be part of the solution to California’s economic problems,” Kozberg says, “by attracting tourists and by providing work for the state’s 250,000 working artists.

“California is the state of the arts.”

A motto in the making?

Meanwhile, other states are also dealing with shortfalls. Without selling vanity plates or coffee mugs, Connecticut’s arts leaders have found a similar solution to threatened privatization and extinction. The state arts council, in effect, dropped what some folks thought an aloof and elitist posture, redefined itself, got seats on various state agencies and got involved in school and tourism programs.

In certain circles in Connecticut, “the arts” is no longer used in polite conversations, but instead, “the arts industry” is accepted.

The program must have worked. The arts council’s annual budget has remained intact and a bond issue financed an endowment while the state’s larger neighbor, Massachusetts, has seen its arts commission decimated.

Slow decimation was facing the Milwaukee Public Museum until earlier last year when the natural and human history facility was turned over by the county to a private nonprofit group. Critics of the move damned the plan by calling it a “privatization scheme” designed to get rid of union employees while selling off the museum’s collections to raise operational funds.

The museum’s president, Barry Rosen, thinks the term “going nonprofit” is more appropriate.

The Milwaukee Public Museum four years ago went through what some Los Angeles institutions are now experiencing: staff cutbacks--7% to 9% a year--and budget slashes--$2 million over a two-year period.

“We had to find ways to stop the hemorrhaging,” Rosen says. After studying suggestions that ranged from a state university takeover to Band-Aid regional financing, the nonprofit idea was proposed and took more than three years to be accepted.

A private management corporation will run the museum for 50 years. The county provides$4 million a year for each of the first five years while collecting annual rent of $10. Itholds title to the building and the museum’s collections. The other $5 million necessary for operations has to be raised privately through community campaigns.

“The private sector contributed heavily,” Rosen says. “Several donors contributed for the first time when we left the public sector. Our nonprofit status is an opportunity for us to build a future. We can now develop our own endowment. That was an idea that was hard to sell previously.

“We’ve developed more efficiencies in our operations, resulting in savings, while increasing fund-raising through an independent board of 27 citizens.” In its first year of nonprofit status the museum has cut expenses $400,000, Rosen says, but isn’t certain how much or if any more could be saved.

He says that 4,000 museum jobs nationally have been lost in the past 20 months due to the recession and shrinking public budgets. “The nonprofit arrangement that we have here might help elsewhere,” he says.

It has happened elsewhere at formerly public institutions in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and North Carolina where nonprofit private boards operate publicly supported facilities. Special interest license plates have caught on elsewhere, too, in Maryland and Florida, for example.

But no state will put as much hope and effort into inspiring private-sector support through a couple of pieces of metal as will California. The hopefuls selling licenses with their individual designs will range from children’s advocates to war veterans, from Yosemite Park supporters to educators. And a few friends of the arts.

“The state is facing enormous financial problems,” the arts council’s Kozberg says. “We just have to look for alternative sources.”

While all of these efforts may not look, sound or feel like privatization, John O’Leary, a policy analyst with the Reason Foundation in Los Angeles says that “a form of privatization occurs when arts organizations try to raise money to supplement or supplant ordinary sources such as state money. It’s called ‘load shedding’ when a government function ceases to be done by the government and goes private. Now what we are seeing is funds being removed and agencies being weaned off public financing. The result: bigger fees and larger campaigns for contributions.”

What’s that you say, Frank Slade? Hoooooo-ahh?