Five Latino Organizations Seek Grant for Programming

Competing groups led by actors Edward James Olmos and Jimmy Smits are among five organizations still in the running for a three-year grant from the Corp. for Public Broadcasting to develop and fund Latino programming for public television.

The CPB is expected to award the grant Aug. 31 with the hope of having the winning group in place by Oct. 1, the start of the federal fiscal year. However, one source said a decision may already have been made. A CPB panel met Aug. 6 to review grant applications and reportedly made a preliminary recommendation at that time, but that decision was not made public. CPB President Robert T. Coonrod is on vacation and was not available for comment.

The Latino Public Broadcasting Project, a group headed by Olmos, was appointed to CPB’s five-member minority consortia to distribute production money on an interim basis last November while applications for a permanent administrator were sought. Olmos’ group replaced the Los Angeles-based National Latino Communications Center, which was de-funded by CPB 17 months ago amid charges of financial mismanagement.

In addition to the Olmos group, other organizations known to have applied for the right to administer CPB funds include the Washington-based National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts, founded by Smits and three others; the Los Angeles-based advocacy group National Hispanic Media Coalition; a newly formed organization composed primarily of the Assn. of Hispanic Arts of New York, San Francisco’s Cine Accion and the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center of San Antonio; and the four-station New Jersey Network of public television and radio broadcasters.

At issue is $650,000 a year in funding for the development, production and distribution of public-television programming. And although that amount is just a fraction of a percent of the CPB’s $300-million budget for the coming fiscal year, the ability to control those funds carries a lot of weight in the tight-knit community of independent Latino producers, for whom the cachet of public television is important.

Although the Olmos’ and Smits’ groups are reportedly the front-runners, according to sources close to the process, Washington attorney Felix Sanchez, who helped draft the proposal for the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts, says personalities shouldn’t influence the CPB.

“Our proposal is not about pitching celebrity solutions,” said Sanchez who, along with actors Esai Morales, Sonia Braga and Smits, created the foundation three years ago. “It’s about developing substantive solutions to deal with the bottleneck of programming . . . and the grooming and elevating of Generation N talent.”

For his part, Olmos has cultivated a good personal relationship with CPB’s Coonrod during his 10 months with the minority consortia, and some within the CPB believe the group should build on that chemistry rather than start over with a new organization. Olmos has been a tireless advocate of the CPB and was the only member of the consortia invited to speak at the group’s annual meeting last June in San Francisco.

More than $1.3 million of programming funds, representing two years’ worth of grants, have gone undistributed since the CPB halted its support of the NLCC in March 1998. But Marlene Dermer, the executive director of Olmos’ organization, says she hopes to begin awarding grants next month. She said they received more than 130 grant requests before the May 4 submission deadline and have begun the process of narrowing those applications to a group of finalists. A panel of five to seven judges will then meet early next month to select grant recipients.