Photo by Doug Duvall
After being chipped away at for the past few years, the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities is getting a bump in Mayor Vince Gray’s budget for the 2013 fiscal year. The DCCAH budget, which dwindled to about $4 million in the 2012 budget, will be raised to as much as $7.6 million in the coming year.
However, it might be more sensible to look at that number with an asterisk, as the budget document expects a $2.5 million transfer from the federal government assuming a line item in the White House budget for 2013 comes through. That provision would wind down the National Capital Arts and Cultural Affairs grant program, which provides operational funding to non-federal arts institutions around the District, and transfer that program’s funds from the federal Commission on Fine Arts to local control.
The Obama administration’s argument for replacing the NCACA program with a lump sum transfer to the District is that the grants are not awarded on a merit-based competition, but according to a formula that determines award sizes based on each participating institution’s overall budget.
The White House first proposed that transfer in its budget for 2012, when it suggested sending $5 million in NCACA funding to the District’s arts commission. In anticipation, Gray’s 2012 budget request anticipated DCCAH funding at $9 million—a hair under $4 million in local funds, with the rest coming from the White House’s idea. But with federal policymakers unable to pass a complete budget last year, the transfer never happened, and local arts funding fell to its lowest level in several years.
Still, even if the $2.5 million transfer fails to materialize, that would leave the DCCAH with about $5.1 million for fiscal 2013. Of that amount, $4.4 million would be funded by District revenues, with the remainder coming from a federal grant. And even if the increase in arts funding is just $1.2 million, that has members of the District’s arts community happy with today’s release.
“You gotta start the conversation somewhere,” said Linda Levy, the president of TheatreWashington, the arts advocacy group that also administers the Helen Hayes Awards for area theater. “And I’m very pleased the conversation began in a really positive way. Not just a reactive one, but a proactive one.”
Levy said in an interview after the budget announcement that she and her colleagues met with staffers in the mayor’s office and with members of the D.C. Council and their staffs ahead of the budget’s release. In these meetings, Levy said, she and her fellow advocates stressed the impact of the arts on the District’s economic vitality.
“Part of our message was, ‘Hey guys, we know you can’t get blood out of the stone’,” she said. “Not only are we trying to get out the fiscal importance of arts in this community, but we want to help find solutions for sustainable funding.”
Levy called the increase in local funding, though slight, a bit of progress. “Am I elated?” she asked. Not quite, but a modest raise in arts funding is better than no raise at all.
“There’s a lot of recognition going on about the importance of the arts and arts funding,” she said. “Are these numbers proportional to the way that the arts contributes to the economy of the District? Of course they are not. But let’s go forward. The importance of funding an arts community to create a thriving arts community was heard.”
Robert Bettmann, who runs the group D.C. Advocates for the Arts, was less sanguine than Levy. In an email to his associates that he also shared with DCist, mentioned the DCCAH’s peak funding of nearly 14 million in the fiscal 2009 budget and its continued slashing since then. “The Commission on the Arts and Humanities can not maintain arts service in all eight wards with one quarter of the funding it had three years ago,” Bettmann, who spent part of last week shuttling between Wilson Building offices on behalf of his cause, wrote. “I’m very disappointed by what we’re seeing from the Mayor today.”
Elsewhere in the budget, Gray asked for funds to pay for the city’s nascent ownership of the Lincoln Theatre on U Street NW, including $350,000 for the theater’s operations, as well as $1 million for much-needed renovations and upgrades to the 1,200-seat venue. The DCCAH seized control of the theater on January 1 after its previous managers nearly depleted their coffers.
