Tough times for Pa. arts

This is a time of deep fiscal uncertainty for arts organizations in the Philadelphia region and across the state.

The National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts are trapped, like lost soldiers, in a budgetary no-man's land. Neither agency knows how much will be available for grants in fiscal 2012, and the particularly opaque budget posturing in Washington and Harrisburg makes it impossible even to guess.

This is particularly true in Pennsylvania, where Gov. Corbett proposed essentially flat funding for the state arts agency, after which the state House passed a budget bill that cut the grant budget nearly 70 percent, some of which the Senate now is seeking to restore.

"I'm kind of in limbo-land myself," said Jenny L. Hershour, managing director of Citizens for the Arts in Pennsylvania, an advocacy group.

Last month, the National Endowment for the Arts reported its latest round of grants to arts organizations, including 25 in Philadelphia that brought the city's total this fiscal year to 57 grants worth $1.68 million.

That compares to 2010's 68 grants worth $1.63 million, according to numbers supplied by the endowment. In other words, fairly steady.

Next year, however, will be another matter. No one in Washington has a clue how President Obama's proposed fiscal 2012 budget will play out, but few think Congress will seek more money for the arts endowment.

Obama has proposed cutting about 12.5 percent from overall endowment funding. But from arts organizations' perspective, that is misleading, because all the reductions will come from grant-making; administrative funding will increase.

Of the proposed $146.25 million endowment budget in 2012, $28 million would go for salaries and expenses in Washington, an increase of more than $1 million in those costs over 2011. According to Office of Management and Budget figures, the full endowment budget for 2011 is projected to be about $181 million.

The amount proposed for 2012 grant-making, however, has been slashed from what the OMB reports is $154 million this year to a proposed $118.2 million in fiscal 2012, a cut of about $35.8 million. And program funding would bear the brunt of the reduction, dropping almost 24 percent.

Victoria Hutter, an endowment spokeswoman, wrote in an e-mail that rising numbers of applications required substantial staff "to effectively and efficiently carry out the mission and responsibilities of the agency."

In Harrisburg, where lawmakers are in the midst of particularly complicated and fluid haggling, the state arts council seems like a mouse being trampled by elephants.

In his $27.3 billion budget, Corbett proposed essentially flat funding for the arts council: $9.2 million, or .03 percent of the whole.

That $9.2 million represents a decline of about 40 percent from the $15.2 million allocated in 2008.

But last month, the state House of Representatives passed a budget that stunned the arts community and even caught legislators by surprise. It called for a cut of nearly 70 percent in the arts council's grant-making budget, slashing program funds from $8.6 million to $2.5 million, which would place Pennsylvania's per-capita arts spending 46th out of the 50 states.

State senators have been meeting in private to address numerous issues with the House-passed budget, including arts council funding, and are expected to return an amended budget bill to the House, perhaps by the end of next week.

"The whole situation is kind of murky," said Chuck McIlhinney, a Republican state senator representing parts of Bucks and Montgomery Counties. He is one of several senators from both parties seeking to reverse the cuts.

"We're looking to restore some of these funds," he said. "Whether we can get it through with the governor and House on board, we'll have to see."

McIlhinney pointed out that Corbett and both Democratic and Republican Senate caucuses supported restoring funding - a reason for optimism, he said.

Meanwhile, arts advocates continue to make their case in Harrisburg and elsewhere in Pennsylvania.

Tom Kaiden, head of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, has repeatedly pointed out that the arts generate about $2 billion in state economic activity annually. Arts-related spending, he says, produces about $280 million in state and local tax revenue every year.