The Golden State of Arts Funding

The California Arts Council is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year by attempting what its chairman, Steven Fogel, calls a “new kind of activism.”

Energized by a 60% budget hike in 2000--and the prospect of an even bigger increase on the horizon--the state agency is trying to put a more visible face on the arts and on itself.

“We want to show that arts and culture are to the psyche what clean air and water are to the hardware of the body,” said Fogel, whom Gov. Gray Davis named to the 11-member council of political appointees in 1999. “Our goal is to make support for the arts as sacrosanct as support for ecology--an idea whose time has come.”

Last year, working with a multibillion-dollar state budget surplus, Davis and the Assembly upped the CAC’s $20-million budget by $12 million for fiscal 2000-01--targeting most of the increase for arts education programs, studies and grants. In January, Davis proposed an additional $27.3 million for the coming fiscal year. If approved, California’s $59.3-million arts budget could emerge as the highest in the country, exceeding New York’s current $56.7 million.

In addition to its core mission--awarding grants to individuals and nonprofit arts organizations around the state--the CAC has branched out with such initiatives as the California Creativity Forum, a blue-ribbon panel chaired by First Lady Sharon Davis, currently drafting a state policy on arts education; a first-ever Joint Congress of the Arts, expected to draw 1,000 artists and arts leaders to Sacramento in June for two days of workshops and meetings with legislators; a summer pilot project with the Department of Parks and Recreation bringing performers to 15 state sites; and a public-opinion survey investigating participation in the arts.

The latest CAC effort is the “Year of the Arts--2001,” a promotional campaign kicked off by the agency in January. Funded in part through private-sector partnerships, it seeks to increase awareness of the arts and the role they play in the economy, education and civic life. A different theme will be tackled each month--multicultural arts in July, for instance, and theater in September.

“Most people intuitively know that the arts are good for them, but--and this is probably our fault--regard them an elective, a frill,” said CAC director Barry Hessenius, who heads up the 42-person paid operational staff that carries out policies developed by Fogel’s group. “Actually, nonprofit arts [account] for $2.5 billion in economic activity, 150,000 jobs and about $100 million [in sales tax] to state and local coffers. For every dollar spent on the arts, 11 are spent on related items such as parking, gas and food.”

To spread the word, the agency has hired a public relations firm and sponsored a new Web site, https://www.culturevista.org, that will serve as a program guide for arts events statewide.

“The ‘Year of the Arts’ couldn’t have happened before,” said Paul Minicucci, deputy director of the CAC. “In part, because there was very little [programming] to point to. In part, because we were sword-fighting for a couple of spare nickels. This is the first time we’ve had the money to demonstrate we can affect the culture.”

Created in 1976 by the California Legislature and Gov. Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr., the Arts Council is charged with promoting “artistic awareness, participation and expression” in the state. Buffeted by fiscal and political realities, it’s been on a roller coaster ever since.

The CAC budget, composed of annual allotments from the state’s general fund, federal grants and, since fiscal 1995-1996, revenue from arts license-plate sales, ranked 16th nationally in per capita arts spending in fiscal 1981-82. By the end of the decade, however, it had plunged to 31st. Things went from bad to worse in the 1990s when the state ranked 49th or 50th over the course of six years.

Joanne Kozberg, Arts Council chair from 1988 to 1990 and council director from 1991 to 1993, ascribes the agency’s woes at that time to the recession and the state deficits it created.

“It was a question of survival,” said Kozberg, now the president and chief operating officer of the Los Angeles Music Center. “Legislators actually called for the CAC’s abolition. While the arts are valuable, they’re not a mandated service such as education or corrections. How do you make a case for them instead of the delivery of health care when deciding what to cut?”

Though the economy rebounded in the mid-1990s, the CAC budget remained flat--hovering around $14 million from 1992 to 1998. According to Kimber Craine, communications manager of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, funding for other state arts councils rose steadily during that time. Cuts in funding at the politically embattled National Endowment for the Arts actually helped the states’ cause, Minicucci said, hitting home the danger of relying on federal moneys.

It wasn’t until the 1998-99 budget, at the end of Gov. Pete Wilson’s second term, that the CAC finally got a boost--nearly $6 million. Two years later, the Davis administration’s $12-million increase--the largest to date--raised California’s per capita ranking from 44th to 24th.

That boost is mirrored nationwide: State arts budgets reached a record $447 million in fiscal 2000-01, according to Craine’s organization.

Along with that has come a demand for more accountability. “It’s no longer enough to ask for money,” said Craine. “It’s all about demonstrating the benefits of the spending.”

At the CAC, for example, some of the new arts-in-education funds are being used to assess the impact of arts education programs on behavior, cognition and test scores, at 37 demonstration sites.

Another trend, Craine said, is a shift away from public-awareness campaigns to increasing involvement. That’s the goal of the CAC’s public opinion survey. A statewide random sample will be asked how they feel about the arts and how often they participate. The information will be used to identify areas most in need and to devise strategies for stimulating involvement.

Arts officials across the country are quick to point out that their new prosperity is inherently fragile.

“When state tax revenues start to decline, state agencies start to shrink,” said Nicolette Clarke, executive director of the New York State Council on the Arts. “We always share in the pain.”

Though the CAC’s Fogel expects the 2001-02 proposed budget increase to pass, the economic slowdown and the state’s power crisis could change the equation. And, however generous the proposed arts budget may seem, it still represents a fraction of 1% of Davis’s $104.7-billion budget for fiscal 2001-2. “The arts never had it so good,” Fogel said. “Still, what we have is nothing.

“Supporting the arts still isn’t on the radar screen of most politicians,” he adds. “What’s needed is for the man in the street to speak up and make it politically correct.”