California Arts Council Faces Big Cut in Funds

California Arts Council officials say the state’s new budget, sealed Thursday with Gov. Gray Davis’ signature, means their agency’s support for artists and arts organizations statewide will drop roughly 40%--from $28 million last year to $16.4 million in the 2002-03 fiscal year.

In addition, council officials said they don’t expect to fill any of the seven jobs opened through attrition during the last year and will instead make do with their current 37 staffers.

“It’s a difficult time,” said the council’s Adam Gottlieb.

However, the state’s spending plan shelters the largest single recipient of California Arts Council money, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which for the last few years has been getting $2 million in state money to support its “tools for tolerance” education program. The Wiesenthal allocation, specifically set aside by the governor and legislature, is exempt from the peer-review requirements attached to most of the agency’s organizational grants.

At the 25-year-old Wiesenthal Center’s headquarters, Executive Director Rabbi Meyer May said the “tools for tolerance” program has provided diversity training to more than 40,000 police officers and 30,000 educators over the last six years. May credited the governor with protecting the program “because most people, reacting after 9/11, [realize] we need to have more diversity training, not less.”

The council’s overall annual budget, which includes the money granted to artists and arts organizations, staff salaries, other operating expenses and the Wiesenthal Center’s allocation, was $32 million in 2000-01. It was trimmed to closer to $30 million as the state responded to the wavering economy in 2001-02. In the next year, that figure will decrease to $20 million, with $16.4 million of that earmarked for grants. Council officials say the governor’s move formalizes an agreement forged in early summer among legislators.

In the last year, the agency’s efforts varied from the June selection of UC San Diego professor Quincy Troupe as state poet laureate (a post that includes a $10,000 honorarium) to the earmarking of $127,334 each to the Center Theatre Group’s Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles (for outreach programming, educational programs and new play development) and the San Francisco Symphony (for free outdoor concerts and school programs). Smaller grants included $2,426 to the Redwood Coast Writer’s Center in Eureka for readings and workshops and $11,600 to artist Bella Peralta for an 11-month residency in Weaverville, where she enlisted at-risk teens to create murals around Trinity County.

The greatest challenge posed by this year’s cuts, the council’s Gottlieb said, may be to sparsely populated counties like Trinity, where arts groups get little or no underwriting from other government agencies.

In many respects, the 2002-03 budget marks the end of a winning streak for the 26-year-old California Arts Council. Spurred by a $6-million bump in 1998 as Gov. Pete Wilson’s tenure as governor was winding down and another $12-million bump in 2000 as the Davis administration was setting up, the council’s annual budget more than doubled between 1997 and 2001, according to Gottlieb.