Displaying items by tag: california arts council

Gov. Jerry Brown has gone from an arts Scrooge in January to an arts Santa Claus of sorts in May.

State tax coffers have filled faster than expected this year, and the governor’s annual “May revise” of the original spending plan he proposed in January would share a modest morsel of the wealth -- $5 million -- with the California Arts Council, the state’s arts grant-making agency.

Last spring, some heavy lifting in the California Legislature produced a budget bill that gave state arts funding its first legislated boost in more than a decade, albeit a modest one.

California taxpayers’ investment in the California Arts Council, the state’s grantmaking agency for nonprofit arts organizations and public school arts education, rose from $1 million to $6 million.

But Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget proposal for the coming 2015-16 year puts advocates of arts spending back at the bottom of the hill. His spending plan gives the arts council just $1.1 million from the tax-fed general fund.

As of 2013, California taxpayers will no longer be able to donate their income tax returns to arts programs. In 2010 and 2011, the state added a section to tax forms that allowed taxpayers to check off whether or not they wanted to donate to the California Arts Council as well as 17 other state-funded causes.

The arts option is being nixed from tax forms because it didn’t bring in enough money; the state required that at least $250,000 be donated from tax returns for it to remain on the document. At the end of November 2011, the option only brought $164,330 from 15,940 taxpayers. Arts Council officials stated that if more taxpayers were aware of the organization and its purpose, people would be quicker to donate. The Arts Council is considering getting back on the tax form for 2013, but a new bill would have to be passed in order for that to happen.

In the meantime, Arts Council officials are exploring innovative ways to garner new donations. They are currently considering ways to make specialty arts license plates more accessible to California motorists. The plates, which cost $50 for new ones and $40 for renewals, have been a huge success for the Council. In fact, officials are turning to plate sales for half of its $5.6 million budget for the current fiscal year.

The California Arts Council’s budget took a beating in 2002 and 2003 at the hands of Governor Gray Davis. The organization, which was once a $30 million-a-year agency, never rebounded from the cuts and has been surviving on about $1 million from taxpayers and another $1 million from the National Endowment for the Arts.