Official Fears Cultural Impact From Secession

The proposed breakup of Los Angeles could threaten its status as a cultural capital, making it more difficult to sustain a world-class opera, symphony and museums, a city official said Tuesday during a hearing on secession.

Cultural Affairs Department officials said breaking up could hurt the city, especially if the San Fernando Valley tries to replicate major cultural institutions, taking private and public resources from organizations, such as the Los Angeles Opera and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

“Large cities tend to have certain kinds of world-class ensembles, which small communities, as fine as they are, cannot support, or find more difficult to support,” said Rodney Punt, the department’s director of administration.

At the hearing in City Hall, Punt told a group of consultants studying Valley and Harbor cityhood that if the new cities try to build competing cultural institutions, it could take away support, including Valley-based corporate donors, from the existing Los Angeles organizations.

“If we break up the city, then we also have to look at what the implications are for support of major cultural infrastructure,” Punt said, “Whether there will be support from [the Valley] or whether they are going to try to replicate them and compete with creating major institutions in middling size cities.”

The administrator said the Valley--with its 1.3 million residents--might have trouble recreating and sustaining major arts organizations if it breaks away to become a municipality about the size of San Diego.

“They have trouble supporting some of their major institutions in San Diego,” Punt said. “They have trouble supporting their opera and symphony.”

Because it would be difficult for a new Valley city to create its own major arts institutions to rival those in Los Angeles, Cultural Affairs General Manager Adolfo Nodal said later he thinks it is unlikely that secession would result in great harm to Los Angeles’s arts organizations.

“I don’t think they get a lot of support from the Valley,” Nodal said.

Valley residents would still go to the Hollywood Bowl, the opera and to established museums in Los Angeles, predicted Jeff Brain, president of the secession group Valley VOTE.

Brain said the Valley may want someday to have its own cultural institutions, but he does not see an immediate competition with existing organizations in Los Angeles.

“The priority for people in the Valley is they want more police, cleaner parks, libraries open longer,” Brain said. “I think it would be some time before the Valley would seek to compete with cultural institutions.”

The concern of secessionists is that the Valley has not gotten its share of city cultural dollars, Brain said.

“We have been deprived of cultural resources in the Valley,” Brain said.

A lack of large theaters and other facilities has hindered efforts to funnel arts grants to the Valley, although efforts are improving.

Arts grants going to Valley groups have increased from 2% to 7% in recent years, according to Roella Hseih Louie, who heads the program for the Cultural Affairs Department.

Louie said during Tuesday’s hearing that much of the cultural affairs budget comes from hotel taxes, and most of the city’s hotels are outside the Valley, meaning there could be less revenue available for the arts in the Valley.

The hearing was one of a series being held by consultants for the Local Agency Formation Commission with city managers to get a handle on issues that might come up in deciding whether secession would harm Los Angeles or the communities breaking away.

Based on the outcome of the study, LAFCO could put Valley and Harbor cityhood proposals before the voters in November 2002.