Not All Donors Think Government Should Subsidize

Many of Orange County’s most generous arts donors have contributed thousands of dollars to help elect congressmen who want to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts, the federal agency that supports many of the county’s top arts groups.

Nothing wrong with that, says Donna Crean of Newport Beach, who, with her husband, John, donates to the Orange County Philharmonic Society, the Pacific Symphony and the Master Chorale of Orange County. The way she sees it, “the government should not support the arts.”

Frank Lynch, a major supporter of Ballet Pacifica of Laguna Beach, thinks that perhaps the government should support the arts, which puts him at odds with his representative, Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach), an NEA opponent. But on other issues, he agrees with Cox more often than not and supports him, with his vote and campaign contributions, despite the NEA business.

“You don’t expect to agree with any political figure on every specific issue,” says Lynch. “You look for individuals with whom you can agree in principal over the most important things.”

Rondell B. Hanson, president of the Pacific Symphony’s board of directors, says he cannot reconcile his support for both Cox and the NEA.

“I’d hate to see [federal] funding for the arts go away,” Hanson said. Still, he said, he has no intention of lessening his support for Cox.

The American Arts Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group for the NEA and roughly 2,600 nonprofit arts groups, has given Cox zero out of 100 on its 1995 “Voting Record.” So far this year, the congressman has voted six times against measures that would have benefited the arts.

(Other Orange County congressional representatives who are batting zero in the alliance’s eyes were Reps. Robert K. Dornan [R-Garden Grove], Dana Rohrabacher [R-Huntington Beach] and Ed Royce [R-Fullerton]. Jay C. Kim [R-Diamond Bar] received 17 points. Rep. Ron Packard [R-Oceanside] got 33. Southland congressmen who scored high include Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), who scored 100, and Steve Horn (R-Long Beach), 90.

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According to Federal Election Commission reports on contributions from 1993 and 1994, major local arts supporters have been heavily supporting Cox. That’s due at least in part to the fact that Cox’s district covers the heart of the county’s arts community, where more board members for Newport, Irvine, Laguna Beach and Santa Ana-based groups live.

Most of the votes on which the alliance based its scores were cast in favor of reductions in the NEA’s $168-million budget for 1995. Conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives proposed last week that the NEA be abolished by 1997. The full House and the Senate have yet to vote on the proposal.

Another Pacific Symphony trustee and major local arts donor, Roger W. Johnson, was the only Cox supporter who said he might retract that support if, after all is said and done, the NEA’s budget is severely reduced or zeroed out.

Like Lynch, Johnson--a Republican who runs the General Services Administration--said he doesn’t base his support on any single issue. But he noted that until this year, the NEA “was not in danger.”

“We used to have a Democratic administration and Democratic control of Congress, and they certainly were not going to hurt the NEA,” Johnson said. Now, however, “I’ll be watching closer than I ever have how the [Orange County congressional] delegation votes.”

Cox said in a recent phone interview from Washington that he would like to see the endowment eliminated as part of a general effort to reduce federal spending and to control the deficit.

“If Draconian budget cuts are necessary,” he said, “and we’re looking at over $100 billion in [potential] cuts shortly, then the arts, which are already privately supported in the main, cannot be immune.”

The only area that must not be cut, Cox said, is Social Security benefits for seniors, who are close to retirement and have paid into the system for decades.

In place of the NEA, Cox said, the government “should encourage greater private giving to the arts” by changing the tax code. On that front, Cox recently co-authored a bill that would allow taxpayers who do not itemize to take deductions for charitable contributions of more than $1,000, said Cox spokesman Antony Korenstein. That measure also would exempt such contributions from a current limitation on itemized deductions.

Cox said that his bill, if passed, could result in an additional $1.3 billion in annual donations to the arts. He said he based his prediction on a calculation by Fiscal Associates Inc., a private economic consulting firm based in Virginia. The firm arrived at that figure by comparing charitable contributions and Americans’ adjusted gross incomes before and after limits on itemized deductions were imposed, according to firm president Gary Robbins.

Alliance deputy director Lee Kessler countered that since non-itemizers don’t deduct charitable contributions now, there is no way to measure how much they might deduct--and how much they would donate to the arts--if Cox’s law were passed.

Cox admitted that “there can be wide discrepancies in various economic estimates” of potential donations under a new tax code. But he asserted that “long experience” has shown that charitable contributions increase with tax laws that encourage donations.

Kessler maintains that NEA grants, which are prestigious and which must be matched with private dollars, stimulate private giving. On average, she said, NEA grants are matched 12-to-1, far above the 3-to-1 minimum requirement. These crucial grants, Kessler said, “are often times seed money needed to start a project.”

Cox said that eradication of the NEA would end controversies over whether art deserves federal financial support or whether those that do receive public funds should be restricted in content.

But Kessler said the NEA evens out an “unequal distribution of artistic resources. The NEA is able to look at the national picture and decide where arts dollars are best spent to provide the American public with an arts presence and experience. Individuals give in their local communities. If communities are sparsely populated, how will the communities get the benefit?”

Even in these tough financial times, Kessler said, the NEA should be immune from budget cuts, because it costs the government only 64 cents per person annually--”the cost of two postage stamps”--to run the agency, which “provides an extraordinary return in social, economic and educational benefits to communities and people across the country.”

In any case, only one of several local arts patrons interviewed recently knew of Cox’s tax-incentive plan. With or without it, most said, they intend to keep supporting him financially.

“I don’t like to give money to my government for them to turn around and to give it to things I want to support,” Crean said. “The government is a bureaucracy, and it costs a lot more money to do things. I’d rather give directly. There’s more money from me that way.”

Corona del Mar resident Lynch said he would not go so far as to endorse the NEA’s eradication but that he has mixed emotions, is mindful of the growing federal deficit and takes issue with certain NEA practices.

Most critical right now is the “country’s economic condition and the direction that it’s taking,” he said. Lynch was a leading donor to the Orange County Performing Arts Center’s building campaign and is a former center trustee. He also is a former member of the American Council of the Arts in Washington and board member of the Irvine Barclay Theatre and was chairman of UC Irvine’s Dean’s Fine Arts Council.

Lynch said he thinks some governmental grants may be determined less by artistic excellence than by the ethnic makeup of an organization’s board. He questions whether the judgments of artist peer panels determining who gets NEA grants are “always the best.”

Pacific Symphony president Hanson, who does not want the NEA abolished, said he’ll be sending Cox “even more” money in the future.

“I believe it’s civilized for the government to help art, and it’s certainly helped us at the symphony,” Hanson said. A 1994 challenge grant of $250,000, earmarked for the orchestra’s endowment, “pushed all our volunteers to go out and match that contribution [3 to 1], so it leveraged $250,000 to $1 million. That stimulation is really good.”

But, added Hanson, who also donates to several other local arts groups, “in a fiscal crisis, I understand the need to cut back. [Federal arts funding] is probably a luxury.”