Fiscal restraint may be in the air as mayoral candidates slug it out, but council’s executive has made it clear it won’t let arts and culture sink into financial oblivion.
On Monday, August 16, the committee bucked the penny-pinching trend and voted to recommend raising per-capita arts spending from $18 to $25, a $17.5 million annual increase, by 2013.
And it was a unanimous vote. Even budget pit bull and erstwhile mayoral candidate Giorgio Mammoliti backed the idea in principle.
While there was still some lingering debate over whether the billboard tax council approved last year should be allocated specifically for arts funding, that notion is as good as dead – to the dismay of arts activists who were the driving force behind the levy. Council declined to earmark it for any specific purpose last fall.
Mayoral candidate Joe Pantalone, in turn, backed the expanded arts budget and has invoked the billboard tax as a possible cash source. (Candidates George Smitherman and Rocco Rossi have also expressed support for the idea of flipping the tax into arts and culture.)
But funding arts via ads is a red herring anyway, according to Councillor Shelley Carroll. Even if the billboard tax were fully allocated to the arts, she says, it would only cover a portion of the proposed annual increase.
“The billboard tax generated the discussion about the fact that we are underfunding the arts,” she said. “We’re going beyond billboard tax.”
The tax is only expected to raise $10.4 million annually, and not all of that would be available after billboard enforcement costs are taken into account.
Still, extra arts cash may not be easy to find. Councillor Doug Holyday on Monday briefly poured cold water on the feel-good vibe. “It might be nice and it might be politically smart,” he offered, “but can we afford it?”
He voted for it, too.
There’s still a long way to go before the $25 target is reached, a goal set out in the 2003 10-year culture plan. Monday’s vote is only binding in that it directs the city to keep working on it – more a political aspiration than an ironclad agenda. (The committee also voted to pursue the waterfront hockey complex that would cost $54 million more than has been committed).
The recommendation will go before full council later this month, but if it’s passed, there’s no guarantee that it will make it into future budgets.
Meanwhile, there’s also the thorny matter of who would get additional arts funds. Howard Moscoe was adamant that community arts groups be given the highest priority as opposed to the larger, more established public institutions. “For art to survive at the upper levels, we have to feed it at its roots,” he argued.
Pantalone, meanwhile, introduced his own amendment that funding should focus on programs in priority neighbourhoods, particularly those in the inner suburbs.
The debate didn’t faze Camilla Holland, co-chair of ArtsVote, who says that kind of tension is part of the process and that there’s an arbitrator for all this. “It’s an excellent organization that has a very fair, transparent and arm’s-length process, and that’s the Toronto Arts Council.”
ArtsVote is co-hosting a mayoral arts debate September 29 at the Art Gallery of Ontario and has conducted a survey gauging each councillor’s level of support for the arts. Report cards will be issued in September.
“An extraordinary number of councillors have been supportive of the arts over the years,” says Holland. But some of them aren’t running again, and “that’s why this election is important.”
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