Watching the Sarasota County Commission discuss allocations of tourist tax dollars for the county’s vibrant arts and culture organizations left me with a lot of questions.
While approving $2.1 million to 35 arts groups, commissioners rejected funding for three popular programs – Embracing Our Differences, the Chalk Festival and WSLR/Fogartyville Community Media and Arts Center.
Commissioner Neil Rainford mentioned his concerns about how they were spending taxpayer dollars. Yes, it is tax dollars, but they are not paid by local taxpayers. The money for these grants is generated by taxes paid by tourists staying in hotels and short-term rentals in Sarasota County. This money actually helps free up taxpayer revenues for other programs.
(I hope I’m not alone in thinking that the local investment should be even greater for such an important industry in our community.)
Trying to understand funding objections
After listening to the discussion, the reasoning behind the commissioners’ decision to cut funding to these three organizations is murky.
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The commissioners stated concerns about not being able to track the number of people attending the free and open outdoor events presented by the Chalk Festival and Embracing Our Differences. Leaders of both organizations have said they were setting up new admissions systems, but they weren’t given a chance to try them out.
If that was the real issue, the county staff would have worked out solutions with the arts groups.
Several people have suggested to me that the Chalk Festival suffered collateral damage to bolster the argument about admissions issues and deflect from the widespread impression that the commissioners find something offensive in the inspiring and warm-hearted posters displayed by Embracing Our Differences. They are expressions of the world we live in and the hope that we can all get along better than we do now.
But we know that anything dealing with diversity, equity and inclusion is problematic in the free state of Florida. That’s also a common denominator between Embracing Our Differences and the progressive music and public affairs programming at WSLR and Fogartyville.
“Our differences are the one thing we all have in common,” reads a quote attached to an Embracing Our Differences poster called “Pigment-nation,” featuring silhouettes of people with different hairstyles (and presumably different skin tones). It was created by ninth- and 12th-grade students at Sarasota’s The Haven.
Apparently, that kind of sentiment is too much for the commissioners.
Using tax funds to attract tourists
These grants were created more than 25 years ago to help arts and culture organizations expand their programming and attract more tourists, which, in turn, would generate more tourist tax money to further expand the programs.
The county has provided millions of dollars to local arts and culture groups ever since, and the program seems to work well. The once “traditional” season of Thanksgiving to Easter is really much longer, giving tourists (and locals alike) more reason to get out and share experiences at museums and performing arts venues.
Embracing our Differences attracts one of the largest audiences of any event in the county each year. Organizers say half of the 420,000 who visited the display this year were from out of the Sarasota area, and more than 43% from out of state. That sounds pretty tourist-friendly to me.
Developer Hugh Culverhouse Jr. and his wife, Eliza, donated $107,643 to cover the loss of county and state funds for Embracing Our Differences.
The Chalk Festival also attracts thousands of people over the course of a long weekend as visitors and residents watch artists create art on the street and return to see the final results.
Rather than letting arts groups continue to use the money for programming, this year, the commission voted to require them to spend at least half of the grant money on marketing their programs. Obviously, arts groups want to promote their events, but that’s a pretty high bar.
At a meeting last winter, Commission Chairman Mike Moran even suggested that he would like to see all the arts grant money go to Visit Sarasota County for the promotion of the arts. But what would the agency have to promote if the organizations don’t have the money to produce tourist-friendly programs?
Arts are an economic driver
Our commissioners, like Gov. Ron DeSantis, who vetoed $32 million in arts funding in June because he doesn’t like money going to fringe festivals, don’t seem to realize how important the arts are to the local and state economy.
An Americans for the Arts study released last fall, revealed that arts and cultural organizations had a $342 million impact in Sarasota County in 2022 and supported more than 5,200 jobs. The study also showed that more than 65% of non-local attendees said the primary purpose of their visit to Sarasota was to attend an arts or cultural program. That’s a significant number.
The state and county money won’t be easy to make up for some of these groups and could lead to changes in staffing or programming.
The arts drive our economy in Sarasota. We boast dozens of organizations that employ thousands of people, and their performances and exhibitions are part of what brings people to Sarasota instead of other beachfront communities in the state. They help make Sarasota the cultural coast and they deserve our support.
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