Voices: Artists in Peril?
In 2001, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge recommended a $1.4 million increase in state arts funding for the 2001-2002 fiscal year. The increase was approved.
But even a $15.4 million budget allocation was still not enough to bring Pennsylvania in line with the national average of $1.44 per capita arts spending or correct the fact that the Commonwealth continues to lag behind all its bordering states including West Virginia in per capita arts spending.
Yet as 2001 came to a close, the newly ascended Schweiker administration placed a freeze on this $1.4 million dollars, money that had already been promised to the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (PCA) and that the PCA had already pledged to its grant applicants.
Further threatening the livelihoods of Pennsylvania artists and the very existence of the arts organizations that attempt to keep them from starving, the Governor has proposed a cut in arts funding for the 2002-2003 fiscal year. The Citizens for the Arts in Pennsylvania (CFA/PA) had requested a $17.5 million dollar appropriation to the PCA for the fiscal year 2002-2003. This amount would represent a $1.46 in per capita arts funding and "would move Pennsylvania closer to the per capita arts funding levels of all our bordering states." Closer, but not quite far enough.
Governor Schweiker has recommended only $14 million.
The governor's budget recommendations for next fiscal year also include more than $75 million to be coupled with federal funding for a total of more than $200 million to be spent on security and emergency response efforts across the commonwealth. It's an "unprecedented investment" a February 6, 2002, state press release proudly asserts.
$200 million.
The $1.4 million seized from the PCA is a mere seventh-tenths of one percent of the brand new homeland security budget, but it is nine percent of the PCA's $15.4 million budget. It is ten percent of the $14 million that Schweiker would see granted.
I'm not suggesting that increased spending on security is unreasonable. Our country is engaged in a war. I want to live as freely and as safely as you do. But we are engaged in a war, a war that in the past six months has repeatedly expanded in scope - how safe can we expect to be?
The Commonwealth has been a "national leader in anti-terrorism planning and emergency response." This is why Ridge got promoted. Pennsylvania is "one of the most prepared states in the nation," Schweiker's press releases boast. We are "a model for the nation," and the governor plans to keep us that way.
Yes, Pennsylvania is on the cutting edge. Yet, if we are doing as well as they claim, why will homeland security cost us an additional $200 million next year. How much will it cost the following year?
The real slap in the face to art organizations and individual artists is that Schweiker's proposed 2002-2003 budget also pledges to "allow Pennsylvanians to weather recession without tax increase for the first time since World War II." Wait, there's more. His budget, in fact, proposes the state's eight consecutive tax cut, a tax cut of $103 million to be precise.
But we don't have $1.4 measly million more dollars to give the PCA. We've got to have our strawberry shortcake with six cherries on top and we want it fed to us with a pristinely, silver spoon. And we want it now.
The arts are not frivolous. They are not expendable. They are absolutely essential to our quality of life, to our self esteem, to our ability to stay sane in a world that's making less and less sense more and more of the time.
Recent studies, including one by the National Governor's Association, have directly linked the role of the arts and cultural tourism to the economic development and health of a region. Schweiker's budget will keep Pennsylvania safer than New York, but as the big apple so festively points, there are reasons other than safety that make a place desirable.
Visit the Citizens for the Arts in Pennsylvania website at www.paarts.org to sign a petition in support of maintaining a $15.4 million appropriation for arts funding.
--alicia grega-pikul, 14 March, 2002
