500 More City of LA Job Cuts Coming? Department of Cultural Affairs to suspend all outgoing grants?

More foul wind coming from the City of LA, again via the LA Times.  Read the whole article.

City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana has backed off from his plan to reduce the Department of Cultural Affairs staff by 48%, going with a still crippling and unacceptable 24%.  And he’s now going after the entire grants budget of the Department of Cultural Affairs.

I cannot overstate how devastating the suspension of $2.2 million in outgoing grants would be to the cultural life of the City of Los Angeles. 

That $2.2 million, as I understand it, largely goes directly into the pockets of arts administrators, artists and teachers, and will no doubt lead to further job cuts outside of the Department.  So while Santana’s newest proposal is “less crippling” to the department, he has now proposed to outsource the problem into dozens of community organizations and non-profits that receive money from the DCA.  Imagine every local festival that relies on DCA support canceling.  This idea would also mean the elimination of the City’s COLA Artist Fellowships, an annual program that directly supports mid-career artists in LA and the Artist in Residence grants that support artists at all point of their careers in delivering direct arts education through innovative programming.  As certain as I am that Santana and the folks in his office have spent long hours trying to make the right budget recommendations, I am equally certain that they simply don’t or can’t understand the nuclear strike that cutting the DCA’s grants program is to the cultural life of the City and to the workers who make that life possible.  Have they done the hard work of contacting current DCA grantees to determine the spreading economic impact should they eliminate the grants program?

This is personal for me.  Even the small DCA grant that Angels Gate Cultural Center receives provide critical money that directly supports artists’ projects at the Center.  Under my own roof, the elimination of DCA funds would take money directly out of the pockets of working artists and the local businesses that provide materials and services for the production of out exhibitions.  Since we started receiving a small amount of annual support from the DCA, I have been able to commission more artists, do better shows and generally improve the quality of our exhibitions programming at Angels Gate.  In truth, that small amount of grant money was the critical element that gave Angels Gate the budgetary room to take our organization to the next level.  As someone already dealing with a “recession era” budget at my organization, we don’t need an economic sucker punch to derail the 12-18 months of programming that we’re already struggling to support.

So while Santana may manage to preserve 15 critical jobs, and still cripple a tiny city department that has just begun to deliver on its promise.  A department who’s budget has been first in line to be slashed again and again over the past decade is not the department to gut when things go bad.  I don’t believe that the DCA will be able to continue to do its job in any relevant way under these cuts, or any cuts at all.  During James Hahn’s administration the whole department was threatened with dissolution and we fought that because we knew that its functions weren’t transferable to other departments.  The DCA is a nucleus of professional workers with specialized skills who leverage those skills and the City’s monies (through grants) to create opportunities for an even greater pool of workers outside of the department to serve America’s largest city.  Either of these proposals or anything in between represents nothing less than a knife to the jugular of the department and must be stopped.

I read again and again about waste at the City of LA, and oftentimes that waste, when compared to the overall budget of the Department of Cultural Affairs, seems titanic.  Recently, a city audit found that the City of LA blows $3 million annually on 12,000 unused phone lines alone.  There’s your entire DCA grant program right there.  How is it that the city can blow through money like that, year after year, when the stakes are so high?

What can you do?

The good folks at Arts for LA have put out a call to action and have a site where you can generate E-mails to your councilpeople.  Even if you don’t live in the City of LA, if you read this site, I guarantee that some aspect of you or your family’s cultural life is threatened.

The next relevant city council is meeting Wednesday, February 3.  Please write or call as many councilpeople as you can before then.  The only thing that’s going to stop this is your letters and calls.  If you know a councilperson, get them on the phone.  Go down to their offices and demand 5 minutes of their time to tell them that their leadership is necessary in this crisis.  These people are our elected advocates and we need their support.  If you have any involvement with your local neighborhood council, get on those folks as well.

A special note to my fellow Council District 15 folks

Our district contains five Department of Cultural Affairs facilities, more than any other district.  The Watts Towers, the Warner Grand Theatre, the Croatian Cultural Center, Banning’s Landing and the Performing Arts Firehouse.  We know how declining DCA budgets have derailed the promise of those facilities, how there isn’t money to program the Warner Grand, and how the Performing Arts Firehouse has been shuttered for nearly a decade, lacking both money for necessary facility upgrades and for programming.  We know that the cultural life of our community is being compromised under the current budget, and I’m sure that we can imagine how much worse things could be with less staff.  Bombard Janice’s office with calls, letters and visits.  She needs to hear from us immediately.  Her Downtown office number is 213.473.7015 and her San Pedro office number is 310.732.4515.

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