Gov. Jerry Brown and the State Legislature have come up with a $7 million appropriation for the California Arts Council, including a $5 million boost from the original budget proposal. The Governor signed the bill last week.
The Arts Council has awarded more than $1 million in grants for a project called Transforming Communities through the Arts, mostly in SoCal, but also including the Oakland Museum of California and Peralta Hacienda Historical Park in Alameda County.
Meanwhile, San Francisco City Arts Agency was docked $384,000 by the Board of Supervisors Budget & Finance Committee for "perpetuating a policy of discrimination." For the second consecutive year, the committee expressed frustration and disappointment at the Grants for the Arts' "inability to address the issue of cultural equity.
The City Budget Analyst on the Grants for the Arts program, voted unanimously to cut nearly $400,000 from the agency’s budget and placed the money into the Cultural Equity Grants program at the San Francisco Arts Commission.
The Supervisors’ action comes one year after committee members initially expressed concern that Grants for the Arts awarded only 23% of its funds to organizations whose artistic programs authentically reflect the lives and experiences of San Francisco’s culturally diverse residents.
Supervisor Eric Mar called for a report on the grants program from the City’s Budget Analyst after GFTA Director Kary Schulman last year assured the committee that her scheduled $450,000 budget increase would “support the new, younger upcoming groups that serve the populations that you (Supervisors Mar and London Breed) referenced.” Instead, in 2013-14 GFTA increased funding to white organizations by a quarter of a million dollars while those representing people of color remained unchanged.
The subsequent report confirmed that virtually no change had taken place during the past 25 years. Since then, GFTA has just released its 2014-15 grant awards: funds to organizations of color increased by six--tenths of one percent. At its current rate of change, Grants for the Arts will not achieve cultural equity until the year 2061.
In 2013-14 the Supervisors had allowed the cuts to be made privately via administrative work order rather than legislatively — ostensibly to save Schulman from being humiliated by having her budget publicly cut because of her department’s discriminatory practices. This year’s legislative action perhaps indicated that the Supervisors are running out of patience.
The battle will continue at the Budget and Finance Committee on July 16, which is when Supervisor Mar has called for a hearing on the Budget Analyst’s Report on GFTA. Supervisor Breed also announced she would hold a second hearing on the Analyst’s Report at the Government Audit & Oversight Committee, which she chairs.