The arts are part of what makes Santa Cruz County special. Let’s fund them.

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.

More than 50 artists and community members packed a Santa Cruz County board of supervisors budget meeting in June to make one point: The arts matter here. 

“The arts are an essential part of our community,” Ruby Vasquez, the co-founder and co-director of Esperanza del Valle, told the board. 

A county staff member told us that more people spoke in support of the arts than on any other budget issue this year. That was grassroots advocacy at its best — artists and community members showing up and fighting for what matters. 

And our supervisors listened.

They unanimously voted to continue our county’s arts funding, albeit with a 15% cut. Supervisors Kim De Serpa, Manu Koenig and Monica Martinez went further, offering up a combined $210,000 in discretionary Measure K funds to help make that funding possible.

That was a meaningful moment for our arts community.

But it was also a warning.

We cannot keep relying on emergency infusions to sustain the arts community that makes Santa Cruz County such a vibrant place to live, work and visit. 

That is why I am asking you to take a short survey as part of Arts Council Santa Cruz County’s arts advocacy coalition. We need your voices to help our supervisors understand the role art plays in our community. 

And we need to hear from you before the next budget crisis hits. 

I have worked in the nonprofit arts sector for more than 20 years and I have watched the dramatic shifts in the funding landscape. Major arts funders, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the Irvine Foundation and the Packard Foundation, have shifted priorities in ways that have impacted funding available to local arts organizations.

Meanwhile, Santa Cruz County’s funding for the Arts Council has been flat since 2017. Accounting for inflation, that amounts to a reduction of more than a third in real dollars.

Now local governments and school districts are confronting their own budget pressures. As deficits grow, elected officials and staff will face difficult choices. Without new sources of support, we will likely see grants, artist professional-development programs, arts education and other programs that have helped build our creative community reduced or eliminated.

A 2011 study published by The Atlantic named Santa Cruz and Watsonville the fifth-most artistic metropolitan area in the United States, based on its high density of creative workers per capita.

While the statistics might have since shifted, there’s no denying that we are a community of creatives — with the most robust Open Studios art tour in the region and a rich scope of arts organizations for a county our size. 

Santa Cruz County’s nonprofit arts sector alone generates about $68.2 million for the economy annually. 

But the economic impact is only part of the story.

Because generations of funders, governments, donors, volunteers and community members invested in the arts, young people here can learn music and dance through programs such as Mariposa Arts and El Sistema. Audiences can experience the world-class Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. Families can see Santa Cruz Shakespeare. Communities can gather through Esperanza del Valle and dozens of other organizations that reflect the extraordinary diversity of this county.

This did not happen by accident. It happened because people invested in it.

And we can choose to keep investing. 

Or, we can watch pieces of this ecosystem disappear.

I know advocacy can make a difference.

In 2022, Watsonville artists, arts leaders and community members spoke up when the city council considered a developer fee for public art. Their advocacy helped persuade the council to triple the fee, from 0.25% to 0.75%.

At the state level, sustained advocacy by California for the Arts and others helped secure millions of dollars in additional support, including increased local assistance funding for the California Arts Council, funding for the Performing Arts Equitable Payroll Fund and the California Cultural Districts program and a $525,000 allocation for the Watsonville cultural district.

Those victories did not happen because someone decided the arts were important in theory. They happened because people made the case repeatedly. 

Now it is Santa Cruz County’s turn to think differently. 

We need funding sources that are reliable and sustainable, rather than dependent on the outcome of each annual budget fight. One possibility is a percent-for-art developer fee, dedicating a small portion of new development costs to public art and cultural programming. Watsonville has already shown that this can work, and communities around the country have used similar approaches to strengthen their creative economies.

We should also consider dedicating a portion of the county’s transient occupancy tax to the arts. Visitors come to Santa Cruz County not only for our beaches and redwoods, but for the cultural life that local artists and arts organizations create. It makes sense to consider whether some of the revenue generated by that tourism should help sustain the cultural assets that attract visitors in the first place.

Yes, public dollars matter. We need roads, parks, health services and many other essential public programs. But too often arts funding gets treated as an optional expense that disappears whenever budgets get tight.

The arts are part of our economy. They educate our children. They bring people together. They help define who we are.

Once the infrastructure that supports a creative community disappears, it is not easily rebuilt.

The June budget hearing showed what happens when our community speaks with one voice: Now we need to build on that momentum.

If you believe the arts are part of what makes Santa Cruz County worth living in, working in and visiting, please take our survey as part of the Arts Council Santa Cruz County’s arts advocacy coalition.

Tell us what you value, what you want to protect and whether you are willing to speak up.

The next budget fight will come. Let’s make sure we are ready. 

Jim Brown is the executive director of Arts Council Santa Cruz County.