By John Foren

A holiday production of Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol has been scrapped, but the spectre of Scrooge still seems to hang over the BoarsHead Theatre in downtown Lansing.

It is a day after BoarsHead’s board cited battered finances in deciding to cancel the play, lay off all employees and hopefully re-open next year. The theater door is locked, the ticket office is closed, the foyer – its walls adorned with photos from past productions – is large and empty.

A lone staffer has the shell-shocked look of someone still processing horrible news. She can’t comment for a story on arts funding in Michigan. She’ll only be here this afternoon, she says, then clarifies in case it’s unclear, “It’s my last day.”

The near-death scene being played out at BoarsHead is being dramatized all over the state.

State cuts in arts funding are crippling cultural institutions large and small throughout Michigan. Public money to the local theater, the big-city symphony and the small town arts education program has dropped from about $50 million two decades ago to a planned $2.3 million in the coming draconian Michigan budget.

Under its planned new budget, Michigan will spend far more in a single day to maintain its state prisons than it does on arts and culture for an entire year.

BoarsHead’s $15,400 grant this year from the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs was a fraction of what it once was. The Detroit Symphony Orchestra receives about a quarter of what it did from the state just six years ago, and the Detroit Institute of Arts cut 20 percent of its staff earlier this year, as it reeled from state cuts and a drop in corporate money from sources such as General Motors.

“We are in an unprecedented crisis,” said Jennifer Goulet, president of ArtServe Michigan, a statewide arts advocacy group. 

It’s not just state money, either. Foundations have seen their portfolios battered by the stock market and aren’t so willing to hand over large grants. GM and other companies simply don’t have the money they used to throw around for community initiatives.

And patrons are being more careful in deciding whether to fork over cash for that avant-garde play at the local community theater.

“We are in a completely different time and it requires new ideas on generating revenue,” Goulet said.

Seeking Solutions

The good news is there may be a happy ending to this tale: The ideas are out there and are bearing fruit in states such as Missouri, California and Minnesota. Those are places that have shed – at least to some degree – a reliance on up-and-down, wherever-the-political-wind blows state general fund money.

Heading for virgin territory and eschewing tried-and-true funding takes a strong stomach by arts backers and political will that’s sometimes been missing in the past. But most supporters seem to realize it’s time for bold action if the arts are to survive in recession-plagued Michigan.

 ”It’s kind of reflective of our times in Michigan,” said state Sen. Tom George, R-Kalamazoo, of the arts crisis. “Our culture, our collective memory, is at risk due to the bad economy.”

Many arts proponents say there are practical reasons the state should be putting money into the arts, as it does in any economic development tool.

Arts and culture organizations provide some 20,000 jobs in Michigan, they say, and millions of dollars for a strapped economy. Plus, music, theaters, galleries and museums are the kinds of things that attract and keep people here, supporters contend.

In Flint, for instance, city leaders use the Cultural Center – with its Sloan Museum, Flint Institute of Arts, and Whiting Theater, among other features – as a key promotional tool.

“The arts and culture is repeatedly regarded as a stepchild, as if it has no value as an investment, when in fact it is so critical to things we talk about doing in this state in the future,” said Cindy Ornstein, president of the Flint Cultural Center. “The issue is what do we want our state to be down the road and how to get there.”

Michigan certainly isn’t alone in slashing its arts budget to plug financial holes.

Total appropriations to state arts agencies are expected to drop about 7 percent in the coming fiscal year, according to data compiled by the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies. It would be twice as much if it weren’t for a new sales tax in Minnesota that dedicates some proceeds to the arts.

About 30 states expect to cut legislative appropriations to their arts agencies in fiscal year 2010. The median decrease is projected at about 20 percent, still far less than Michigan’s planned 72 percent drop.

What’s striking about the national stats, though, is that 13 agencies expect to see an increase in state money in the new  year.

California: Plates for the Arts

The California Arts Council is one of them.

California is no bastion of budget sanity. Its fiscal wars and threats of government shutdowns are perennials in the national media. And, as in Michigan, its total Arts Council budget is a shadow of what it once was.

Still, that budget has steadily increased since the the state’s dark fiscal days of 2003, when Gov. Grey Davis was recalled.

Mary Beth Barber, communications director for the California Arts Council, gives thanks to a license plate featuring an ocean sunset and palm trees. The arts license plate is the best-seller in California (more than 70,000 in 2008) and that’s good news for the Arts Council, which receives the revenue. That’s projected at nearly $3.2 million for 2009-10, some 60 percent of the council’s budget.

“Once those rough waters (of the 2003-04 budget crisis) really happened, it’s been an anchor,” Barber said.

Money from the plates funds the Arts Council’s grants to local agencies and has more than tripled since 2005, thanks to a hefty price hike (it’s now $50 to buy a plate, $40 to renew one). It also received high-profile marketing help; actress Annette Bening, a former Arts Council member, narrated a public service announcement for the plate.

The council’s allocation from the state general fund is bare bones, down to $1.1 million, which is one reason Barber said without the arts plate “things could have been different” for her agency. As in much worse.

Missouri Athlete/Entertainer Tax

That’s the same kind of language arts proponents in Missouri use about their tax on non-resident entertainers and athletes.

The state collects 2 percent of any salary earned for a game, say, by a Detroit Red Wing who comes to play the St. Louis Blues or on a weekly fee for an entertainer at a popular Branson, Mo., dinner theater.

More than half of the money is supposed to go into a trust fund for the arts, another unique concept, established in Missouri in 1993.

“I think we’re in better shape than most arts agencies,” said Beverly Strohmeyer, head of the Missouri Arts Council. “Last year we were able to fully fund all (grant requests from arts agencies).”

That’s not to say Strohmeyer’s agency doesn’t have to deal with legislative politics. While the council is supposed to get the lion’s share of the non-resident tax, it still must lobby lawmakers every year to actually appropriate the money.

From 2003-05, the lobbying didn’t help. None of the tax revenue was directed to the Arts Council, which instead had to dip into its trust fund to finance arts and cultural projects around Missouri.

The council will probably get less than half of the $10 million it’s owed from the tax this fiscal year, Strohmeyer said.

That’s prompted bitter feelings from some arts institutions. The Kansas City Symphony unsuccessfully sued the state in 2006, claiming arts agencies were being shortchanged from the tax. 

Though the tax sounds like a political no-brainer – since it doesn’t impact the pocketbooks of residents and targets high-priced athletes and entertainers – Strohmeyer cautions with a note of weariness.

“It’s not an easy sell,” she said. “It’s not the fact the tax is already there and getting the state to collect it. It’s getting the money appropriated to us.”

Application in Michigan?

Sen. George, however, thinks it’s one way to ease the arts funding crisis in Michigan. He’s pushed for state officials to collect the income tax on athletes and entertainers (as in Missouri, the non-resident tax has been on the books for years) and wants the revenue from it designated for the arts.

George, chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on the arts, estimates that would mean $3 million to $5 million annually. “It’s a shame to think Michigan can’t fund its essential functions and we have out-of-state athletes and entertainers taking our ticket money,” he said. “If you come to Michigan and work for a week, we should tax you.”

Senate Bill 263 is lingering in committee and its future doesn’t appear noticeably brighter than George’s prior attempts at the legislation. SB 263 doesn’t impose a new tax. Income tax already is supposed to be collected from out-of-state athletes and entertainers.

But George estimates, based on past state treasury audits, that only about half is being collected now.  His bill would put more emphasis on getting the money and then directs it to go to the arts.

One problem, he said, is the age-old issue that’s affected arts funding: a feeling from some lawmakers that whatever money is collected should go to something more important than the arts.

Plus, George said, the state would have to dedicate resources to actually collecting the money, a tough sell for an already stretched staff.

He still believes it has a better chance than something broader and more ambitious, like what’s being done in Minnesota.

Minnesota’s 3/8 of a percent sales tax hike, approved by voters last year, is the kind of big-ticket funding measure that even the most ardent Michigan arts booster says won’t happen here.

The effort was years in the making and took millions of dollars in campaign spending from a broad spectrum of groups. The tax money will chiefly benefit environmental causes; about 20 percent goes to the arts. That could total hundreds of millions of dollars over the next 25 years.

If that’s not discouragement enough, tax increases for the arts have failed in the Detroit area in the recent past, most notably with Proposal K in 2002.

Many Michigan arts proponents believe the cultural community simply needs to marshal its forces better and sharpen its message to policymakers.

“The arts is a field that has always had the attitude that we’ll get what we can and make it work. In politics, that just continues to get you cut,” said John Bracey, executive director of the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, the state agency that oversees arts spending.  “If they don’t know who you are, it’s easier to cut you.”