New York City Arts Coalition
Six Month Report
January-June 2006

Over the past six months, the Arts Coalition worked diligently with New York City and State elected officials to increase public support for the cultural community, and to ensure policy changes in funding that expanded access and provided the first steps in stabilizing small and mid-sized groups. Through these efforts, the Coalition achieved significant success both fiscally and policy wise in the final budgets for FY07.

Budget Breakfasts
For the past fifteen years the Arts Coalition has organized New York City arts groups for Arts Day in Albany. Though Arts Day attendees have been enthusiastic about seeing their legislators in their Albany offices, we noted a gradual diminution in attendance of senior staff members over the past few years. A one-day event in Albany also limited the number of arts groups able to participate. In addition one day events do not build sustained relationships, and have a tendency to rely on celebrities to draw attention.

An alternative approach was initiated this year, which combined state and city elected officials in a single event - a breakfast in each of the boroughs (except Manhattan, where scheduling conflicts proved impossible to resolve). Combining the two levels of government is now necessary as all new initiative and "bids" for increased funds must be the preliminary City budget in order to make it through the final negotiations. The City's time line for its preliminary budget is identical with the time line for the State budget.

It had become clear that handling both budgets in the same time span required re-thinking our activities, and where possible, streamlining them.

All of the arts and cultural groups in each borough were invited to each breakfast, as well as each Borough President and all city and state legislators. Arts leaders with busy schedules were able to attend the breakfast for two hours and still have face-to-face contact with their legislators. Where trips to Albany usually attracted 60-65 people, the four breakfasts attracted more than two hundred arts leaders and thirty legislators. Among the latter were several significant leaders in Albany as well as City Council leadership.

Queens, March 2

  • Co-hosted with the New York Hall of Science. Queens Borough President Helen Marshall and City Council Finance Chair David Weprin were among the elected officials speaking at the event for the approximately fifty arts and cultural leaders. (This breakfast also provided a serendipitous opportunity to open a dialog with a key Borough President about re-involving the five BPs in providing operating funds to the cultural community. That effort was later expanded to include discussions with the Manhattan BP office, and is one of the efforts that will be pursued next year.)

Brooklyn, March 3

  • Co-hosted with the Brooklyn Arts Council, and held at Junior's Restaurant. Over 100 local arts leaders were enthralled by Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz's enthusiasm, and inspired by City Council Member and Cultural Affairs Committee Chair Domenic Recchia's remarks.
Staten Island, March 9
  • Co-hosted with the Council on Arts and Humanities for Staten Island. Forty-one Staten Island cultural leaders attended to meet State Senator John Marchi and Assembly Member John Lavelle at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center.
Bronx, March 10
  • Co-hosted with the Bronx Council on the Arts and held at the Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation. More than fifty Bronx cultural leaders attended. An early morning problem at the last minute prevented the Bronx Borough President from attending, but his representative and other officials fielded questions and talked for over an hour with the arts attendees.

These breakfasts are clearly a more effective way for arts leaders to reach their representatives and make their case for increased government funding for the arts. These events also allow more Coalition members to directly experience the work of the Coalition, and provide an opportunity to reach new groups who may not be familiar with the Coalition. (Some new members joined after attending a breakfast.)

Legislators from both the City and State also said it was helpful for them to focus early in the budget process. From the standpoint of the cultural sector, these breakfasts introduce legislators to groups they may not know, and widens their perspective from their district to the larger community.

State Budget
In addition to the breakfasts, some Arts Coalition members and the Chair, Norma Munn, made several trips to Albany throughout February and March, meeting with more than sixty-five State Senators and Assembly members. The focus of these meetings was an initiative aimed at providing cash reserve funding via NYSCA to small and mid-sized arts groups. The decision to push for that type of funding came from discussions with the field as well as the Chair of the Coalition's two decades of experience as President of the Artists Community Federal Credit Union, which loans to both individual artists and arts groups. The single most common reason for a loan from an arts group is cash flow. After a late January meeting with the Chair of the Tourism, Arts, and Sports Development committee, Assembly Member Joseph Morelle, a bill was introduced to provide stabilization grants via NYSCA to small and mid-sized cultural groups.

Subsequent meetings with representatives from New York City, as well as upstate representatives identified over the years as having a serious interest in cultural issues, resulted in widespread support within the Assembly. Passage was ensured when the bill was incorporated into the final budget for NYSCA at the urging of the State Assembly -- a landmark achievement which was only possible due to the support generated from long term contacts with a wide range of Assembly members on both sides of the aisle. It is also unusual to achieve both a structural change within an agency and funding for it in the same legislative session, but anything less would have been useless.

When the state budget was passed on March 31, it included a $2.6 million increase in general NYSCA funds, as well as three new initiatives:

  • $2,000,000 to assist arts groups digitize their work
  • $1,000,000 for a revolving loan program
  • $500,000 stabilization grants in the form of cash reserve funds (This will be initiated as a pilot program for the small and mid-sized theatre groups. This new program was the direct result of the work of the Arts Coalition.)

These new programs demonstrate an understanding that in order to maintain high quality artistic programming, both financial stability and the protection of intellectual assets are essential for the longer term health of the cultural sector.

City Budget
In March, members of the Arts Coalition's Steering Committee had an extensive meeting with then newly-elected Speaker Christine Quinn and the Chair of the Cultural Affairs committee, Domenic Recchia. For more than two hours, an in-depth discussion was held about the future of the arts, cultural funding from the public sector, and other policy issues. It was unique in allowing for a long and frank interchange of information and concerns with two people in such influential positions in the city's government.

Due to the complexities of the DCA budget, a "Roadmap" providing a visual explanation of DCA funding was developed. It was distributed to every City Council member, and discussed with nearly twenty Council members in meetings between March and May. Testimony was also provided at each Council hearing on cultural affairs.

Like the state, the City Council increased its support of the cultural sector this year with a 14% increase in the DCA Expense budget, which now stands at $151.9 million.

A long standing concern of the Arts Coalition has been the extremely limited access to City funding for the majority of cultural groups in the City. The Cultural Development Fund (CDF) provides the only opportunity for any group that isn't a CIG or Program line item to obtain DCA funding. The Arts Coalition obtained a $1.9 million increase to the CDF, which nearly doubled this allocation to $3.75 million. As a result many more arts groups can receive funding and at higher levels than in the past. We are the only group advocating for those funds.

The final DCA budget is:

  • Program: $24.1 million (Includes the CDF $1.9 million increase.)
  • CIGs: $120.2 million
  • Security: $4 million (This is double the prior year, and funds are allocated to twenty one groups ranging from the Metropolitan Museum to the Jewish Museum to the Queens Theater in the Park.)
  • Administration: $4.2 million

Conclusion
The NYC Arts Coalition made a significant impact on public funding for the arts and cultural community in both the city and state budgets this year. We also achieved three policy breakthroughs:

  • acknowledgment in the City of the necessity for increasing access to funding for non-line item groups within the City
  • acknowledgment at a State level that stabilizing the fiscal aspects of arts groups in the smaller and mid-sized category is both desirable and a goal with which the State can and should assist
  • awareness in the City that critical security issues for cultural groups extend beyond those in City owned buildings
It is too soon to know the impact the stabilization grants will have on the theatre groups as they go through this pilot program, but the increase in the DCA's Cultural Development Fund will clearly provide significantly increased funding to more groups than ever this year. Both of these increases should be sustainable for the future, and the Arts Coalition will initiate efforts in the early winter to ensure the continued growth of these funding pools.

August 1, 2006