David Hoppe

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:: Another thing (or two)

About arts funding

By David Hoppe

As feared, Mayor Ballard came forth last week with a 2009 budget proposal that puts public funding for the arts in Indianapolis on a three-year glide path toward elimination. At present, the city invests approximately $1.5 million of its billion dollar-plus budget in the arts. Although a national study has shown that the city actually makes $5 on every arts dollar it invests, this is apparently not enough for city leaders to preserve this line of the Parks and Recreation budget.

You have to wonder how many other lines in the city's budget have this rate of return, but never mind. What is going on here?

It appears Indianapolis is reverting back to its bad old self in at least a couple of ways. The first has to do with the seemingly inbred contempt most city residents harbor for anything they don't immediately understand. The arts fall into this bushel basket of a category. How else to account for the thousands of words the Indianapolis Star lavished on trying to keep locals from hating the Chakaia Booker exhibition of public art. "Keep an open mind," implored the Star' s well-meaning sequence of articles, implying that the expectation - or should I say fear? - was otherwise.

You would have thought that after eight years of Bart Peterson's insistence on making the arts and culture a cornerstone of his administration, our collective appreciation for the arts might have been farther along than that. But Peterson discovered an inconvenient truth on his way to making Indianapolis a "cultural destination" - most people who live here could care less about the arts. That's why he never made the attempt to sell his vision to the people at large, preferring to save his enthusiasm for cultural policy for speeches and public appearances at arts events.

It's also why Peterson never made good on the one practical arts-related promise he made during his first run for office: To pull the arts budget out of Parks and Recreation and give it a line of its own. But that would have meant a showdown with the City-County Council, a political donnybrook Peterson apparently felt he couldn't win - even with a Council controlled by his own party.

Now that the Republicans are in charge, it's been breathtaking to see the speed with which they have chosen to go after this small, but symbolic, fraction of the city's budget. They know that cutting the arts equals cutting fluff, if not waste, in the minds of many local constituents. Forget about the return on the dollars spent and the inconsequential impact these annual cuts will have on the city's very real fiscal problems. As long as the word "art" appears anywhere in the city budget, they know they'll have voters barking at them and, worse, that they won't have a clue about how to answer back.

But something else is going on here. Although a lot of Republicans would rather not admit it right now, they share George Bush's ideology - a belief that government can't do anything as well as the private sector. This means that the last thing they want to see is a publicly-funded program that actually works. When that happens, it challenges everything they stand for. And so a program that repays community investment five times over cannot be allowed to stand. It sets a dangerous precedent.

"Don't worry," say the city's Republican leaders. Even with cuts to public money, the arts can still receive their annual million dollars from the Capital Improvements Board. This is like whistling past a graveyard. The CIB has its hands full with Lucas Oil Stadium. If this summer's $5.6 million flood is any indicator, maintenance for that building will likely be more costly than anyone has planned for. Don't be surprised if that's where that extra million winds up.

Which will be ironic. During the Peterson years the economist Richard Florida's research regarding "the Creative Class" had a lot of people talking, especially given Indy's lamentable brain drain. Young professionals, said Florida, could care less about sports stadiums. They look for cities that offer world-class arts experiences, social tolerance and mass transit.

I wonder what they'll think about a city that eliminates its arts funding and calls that fiscal responsibility. Now I remember: it used to be called IndiaNOplace.