Fresno arts council, not City Hall, should decide who gets Measure P money for local art | Opinion

For a while now, since the Great Recession if not longer, Fresno didn’t give a fig about supporting the arts.

No less an authority on fiscal matters than Lee Brand, who served eight years on the Fresno City Council (from 2008-16) followed by four as mayor, once told me arts groups had never been granted more than $100,000 in any given year during his time at City Hall.

One hundred thousand dollars is chicken feed — relatively speaking — so there wasn’t much to fight over.

Gratefully, the days of Fresno giving short shrift to the cultural arts will soon be in the past. Thanks to Measure P, the 3/8th-cent sales tax that went into effect July 2021, the city’s fiscal year 2023 budget includes $10.5 million “to invest in competitive grants for nonprofit organizations that support and expand access to arts and cultural programming.”

However, arguments over who has the authority to select and award those grants have started to gain volume. They may have reached a crescendo during Monday’s Parks Recreation and Arts Commission meeting, when dozens of speakers took turns imploring city officials not to freeze out the Fresno Arts Council.

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“It is essential that the Fresno Arts Council be part of that decision-making process,” said Gerald Palladino, president of the Fresno Art Museum Board of Trustees.

“Fresno Arts Council is the only organization in this city with the expertise to represent us,” added Nefesha Yisra’el, executive director of the African-American Historical & Cultural Museum.

“We believe the ordinance is quite clear with respect to the role of the (Parks Recreation and Arts) commission and the Fresno Arts Council,” said Stephen Wilson, president and CEO of Fresno Philharmonic.

It is indeed. Under the Measure P expenditure plan, 12% of the collected funds are earmarked to nonprofit art organizations and artists through competitive grants that “shall be implemented” by the Parks, Recreation and Arts Commission “in partnership” with the Fresno Arts Council. (The commission is a nine-member body appointed by the mayor and approved by the City Council. The nonprofit arts council is the designated local arts agency for both the city and Fresno County and also serves as the local partner to the California Arts Council.)

Is arts council being frozen out?

So what’s the problem? There are indications, expressed in a Feb. 4 email from city Parks Director Aaron Aguirre to Fresno Arts Council executive director Lilia González Chávez, that city staff are attempting to strong-arm the process.

In the email, initially brought to light by The Munro Review, a local news website that focuses on the arts, Aguirre appears to reject the idea that the nonprofit should be paid for managing the granting process and performing other administrative functions.

This is unacceptable. Measure P allows the city to use up to 2% of the collected funds for administrative costs, and you can be sure officials will do exactly that. But the Fresno Arts Council is expected to sift through dozens of grant applications annually and make recommendations for free? C’mon.

Freezing out the Fresno Arts Council appears to be a pattern. Last April, the City Council awarded a Brooklyn-based consulting firm $150,000 to prepare a Measure P-required Cultural Arts Plan that must be approved before any grants can be awarded.

Those same consultants, according to González Chávez, didn’t even bother consulting the Fresno Arts Council before submitting a draft version.

No wonder the local arts community is suspicious of the city’s motives. And, frankly, they ought to be given Fresno’s dubious recent history in these matters.

As former State Center Community College District trustee Eric Payne put it during the commission meeting, “City leadership has been dismissive of the public’s will.”

The last thing the public wants is for politicians and bureaucrats to decide which local arts organizations and individual artists receive Measure P grants and which don’t.

Assurances from Dyer, city manager

While listening to speaker after speaker protest the art council’s apparent diminished role, I contacted Mayor Jerry Dyer and City Manager Georgeanne White for their assurances this wasn’t actually happening. That the nonprofit wasn’t, in fact, being stiff-armed by unelected parks staff.

Both reassured me this wasn’t the case. White said she “committed” to González Chávez during a recent meeting that the Fresno Arts Council “absolutely will be instrumental in the grant-making process.”

“I told Lilia that I agree the city has no business evaluating artist grant proposals and that the Arts Council is the organization to do that and we should be contracting with them to do that,” White said via text.

Dyer offered a similar response via email: “I expect the Arts Council to be very involved in how the Measure P dollars get awarded to arts and cultural organizations since they are the experts. I would also expect the Arts Council to provide the City and the (Parks Recreation and Arts Commission) with a detailed spending plan in advance of funding being provided to them.”

Dyer went on to say a draft version of the Cultural Arts Plan has been completed and that a copy has been given to both the commission and the arts council. The final version is scheduled to be adopted in May.

Such statements by the mayor and city manager should put to rest many, if not all, of the concerns expressed Monday evening. But we shall see.