[BoulderCouncilHotline] Cultural Facilities Funding

[Yates, Bob]

Council Colleagues:


During our budget discussion this evening, I will propose that we designate funds from the 2019 budget for funding for some of our large, facilities-based organizations that provide community cultural and educational programing.


While, in the past, the city's Office of Arts and Culture has provided some general operating funding to some of these facilities-based organizations, there are at least two problems with the current arrangement:


  1.  To be meaningful to these larger organizations, the grants have been large, in the range of $20,000 to $50,000, which takes funding away from smaller arts and culture organizations where these amounts of money would go a long ways. For example, a $50,000 grant to one large organization effectively competes with 10 grants of $5,000 for individual artists and small arts organizations for which $5,000 would be quite meaningful.
  2.  Not surprisingly, the Arts Commission, which awards these general operating support grants, tends to focus on arts organizations, thereby excluding worthy cultural and educational organizations, like the Museum of Boulder and Chautauqua, which may be deemed insufficiently focused on "art."


If we look to our peer cities on the Front Range, we see that many of those communities provide significant operating support for their museums and other cultural amenities, sometimes as much as 50 to 100 percent of their operating budgets. By comparison, Boulder supports less than ten percent of the operating costs of our facilities-based cultural organizations, with some receiving virtually no support at all.


To remedy these challenges, I will propose this evening that we allocate something in the range of $200,000 to $250,000 in the 2019 budget for a pilot program to support programing by our facilities-based cultural and educational organizations. Here are a few criteria that we might apply:


- The funding for facilities-based cultural organizations would be incremental to that proposed in the 2019 budget for arts funding. The incremental fund would be separately administered by the city's Office of Arts and Culture and the Arts Commission, so that funding for the facilities-based cultural organizations does not compete with funding for artists and small arts organizations (indeed, it will free up money for these folks).


- One of the grant criterion would be that the applicant must be facilities-based. This could include organizations like the Dairy, the Museum of Boulder, BMoCA, Chautauqua, e-Town, Studio Arts, and perhaps a few others.


- Another grant criterion would be that the funding would be used for cultural, educational (and perhaps even scientific) programs, primarily for the benefit of members of the community. That is, the programs would not have to be limited to "art," but could certainly include art. The programs that would be funded by the grant would be specifically identified in the grant application, and each grant recipient would provide a post-program report of the impact on the community.


- Finally, the grants to facilities-based cultural organizations would be competitive and would be made annually (although a longer period of time could be considered to provide continuity and certainty).


Thank you in advance for considering this proposal.

Best,

Bob



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