Lip Service, or Did you know arts and culture are a profitable investment for city governments?
Every year (or so), the San José City Council gets together on a Tuesday afternoon to update its master list of policy priorities. In the past, this process has created a flurry of memos and emails and texts and phone calls over 2–3 frenetic weeks on the 18th Floor of City Hall.
The result is traditionally a shit show of a public meeting, with six hours of public comment and discussion culminating in hurt feelings and watered-down policy proposals, as councilmembers twist themselves into pretzels in vain attempts to satisfy their constituents, their values, and the well-heeled lobbyists beating down their doors.
It’s like watching your elected leaders take a yoga class in formal suits and dresses.
This year was no different, despite the valiant efforts of the City Clerk to reign in the nomination process. The memos were flying so fast and furious, in fact, that some councilmembers flat out forgot to include some of their standing priorities for nomination.
One of those late-arriving memos came from Councilmember Magdalena Carrasco, liaison to the San José Arts Commission, on which I was honored to serve from 2012–2016. The policy she proposed for the priority list was a “private percent for art” ordinance, a long-standing goal of the City’s master planning.
The concept is a simple one: Private developments in San José would have the choice of incorporating public art into their projects or paying a fee based on the scale of their project — typically 1% of total project cost — to fund the development and maintenance of public art projects managed by the city.
Cities across the country have had this type of fee in place for years, including many of San José’s neighbors like Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, and Walnut Creek, as well as major urban centers like Los Angeles and New York. I mention this because an oft-repeated argument against the policy — from (wait for it) the development community — is that it would stifle private development, which appears to be doing just fine in all of these cities.
Regardless, the policy failed to make the priority list, and politics alone are not to blame. But let’s take a step back for a minute and look at the bigger picture: Funding for arts and culture is a mess, from the national level down to the local, and we’re all to blame for that.
Elected officials and government bureaucrats struggle to grasp the tangible benefits of investing in creativity, and those who try to offer their support can’t seem to articulate the need beyond vague references to feel-good concepts, with no dollars or data to back up their positions.
Meanwhile, arts advocates and practitioners are a diverse and disorganized diaspora of dynamic personalities and wildly varying priorities, fighting over the last mangled piece of the pie instead of working together to bake a bigger pie.
Lacking the resources and unity to pose a serious threat to the political establishment, and without champions inside the halls of government who are skilled at their craft, the arts and cultural community will forever face a frustrating cycle of disappointment and relegation.
Coming back to earth, consider the current situation at San José’s Office of Cultural Affairs, the agency tasked with managing the City’s creative grants, community events, and public art programs, among myriad other tasks related to improving San José’s brand. Those grant programs provide more than $4 million in support to more than 80 nonprofit arts organizations.
According to a 2015 study by Americans for the Arts, San José’s nonprofit arts organizations generate more than $190 million in annual spending and support 4,255 jobs. Spending $4 million to generate $190 million sounds like a sound investment to me. So where does OCA get the money to do this?
Outside of matching funds for the maintenance of public cultural facilities, the entirety of the OCA’s funding — including staff salaries, admin, and overhead — comes from what’s known as the Transient Occupancy Tax, or “TOT”. This is a fee you pay when you stay in a hotel in San José, or just about anywhere. (Check your line-item invoice for the percentage of TOT in any given city.)
Ostensibly, the TOT is paid by people who don’t live in San José and travel here to attend conventions and major events, and to experience — wait for it — arts and culture. As such, a case could be made that the OCA is a 100% cost recovery department.
Now I may just be a blogger with a fine arts degree, but this makes me wonder why there seems to be a perception that the arts are a waste of money, at least when it comes to public dollars. The general consensus seems to be, at least around these parts, that if it’s not related to public safety or public works, it’s should not be a core concern of the city.
This perception has had serious consequences for the City’s Public Art Program, which, according to recent reports to the Arts Commission, is teetering on the brink of insolvency and barely capable of keeping up with basic maintenance on the city’s current portfolio of more than 150 works and installations.
A unique division within the OCA, the Public Art Program is funded in part by a fee of 1% on public construction projects — such as convention centers, libraries, and community centers. Of course, with public projects in short supply of late, this funding mechanism is not getting the job done on its own.
It certainly didn’t help matters last March, when the City Auditor attempted to claw back public art fees from the renovation of our regional wastewater treatment plant, apparently using the rationale that the plant was not a public project. The fact that much of that funding had already been spent or committed was the only saving grace, and the council rejected the Auditor’s recommendation.
But scars from the battle remain, alongside the wounds of a thousand cuts made over the past two decades since the term of Mayor Susan Hammer, one of the last true arts advocates among city leaders.
And it’s not just the arts feeling the slide. Every year, I stand before the council with the same tireless advocates for our parks, libraries, and nonprofit housing providers, practically begging the mayor and council to align city policies with our values as a community.
Time after time, our residents list these so-called “quality of life” issues as fundamental elements of a city where they want to live, work, and play. So why are we not doing everything we can to provide these elements for our residents — and everyone else we want to come here to settle down or spend their TOT dollars?
It starts with leadership. Last-minute memos and half-hearted community organizing are not enough. Either an elected leader needs to take command of the issue, or San José’s arts and cultural community needs to come together around our common values and force the issue.
Given what I know about the political will of local government officials, I’m leaning toward the latter. And I welcome your ideas about how it could work.
