Quick Take
Following a nearly two-hour discussion and after hearing from the county’s arts community Wednesday, Santa Cruz County supervisors delayed their approval of the parks department budget, which included a proposed cut to arts funding to local organizations.
They showed up in droves to the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors chambers, many dressed in black to symbolize a life without the arts and the color it brings to the community.
The members of the local arts community were there Wednesday morning to protest a proposal to cut a $170,000 contract with Arts Council Santa Cruz County and reduce funding for the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History in order to patch a hole in the parks department budget.
“The arts are not the easy cut; they are not amenities. They are actually hand-in-hand with the environmental landscape of this community. They are our identity,” said Ellen Primack, former executive director of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music.
The creative environment and the arts of Santa Cruz County is one of the reasons why people come to live here, she told the supervisors. “They define the quality of life here, they define why people visit here,” she said.
Ruby Vasquez, a lifelong member of the arts community in the Pajaro Valley, shared how her youth ballet folklorico group, Estrellas de Esperanza, not only preserves Mexican cultural traditions but also heals dancers and those watching the performances.
“The arts are an essential part of our community,” Vasquez said as members of the arts community nodded their heads or snapped their fingers in agreement.
For many of these artists, it was their first time attending a board of supervisors meeting.
The proposed cuts came after the supervisors rejected a controversial plan to charge for parking at popular local parks, forcing staff to go back to the drawing board to look for other ways to save money.
The previous time county parks director Jeff Gaffney was in front of the five-member board with the arts community, 10 years ago, he was celebrating an increase in funding to the arts, he said — a complete opposite of where things stood Wednesday.
Before diving into his revised budget plan, Gaffney shared with the elected officials and community leaders in the audience where his love for the arts stems from.
“My love for art started 45 years ago, the summer theater arts repertoire program in Gilroy,” he said. “So this is a very difficult budget for me to propose to this board.”
Gaffney’s department was left with a $590,000 budget gap after dropping the idea to create the pay-to-park pilot program, and restoring seven-day operations at popular Simpkins Family Swim Center and restoring extra park maintenance staff, he said.
Cutting the $170,046 contract with the Arts Council and reducing funding to the Santa Cruz MAH by nearly 50% would help patch that gap, Gaffney said, along with other cost-trimming solutions such as using Measure K funding and reducing software programming costs.
Arts Council Executive Director Jim Brown told Lookout on Monday that the $170,046 contract covers more than half of the organization’s granting budget. On average, it gives away nearly $220,000 every year in grant money to arts organizations across the county, including the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music and Vasquez’s dance troupe.
The other portion goes into managing exhibits at the county’s Ocean Street government building and the Arts Council’s general operations, which support its arts education programs, the annual Open Studios art tour and other work, Brown said.
MAH executive director Ginger Shulick Porcella previously said that a reduction in funding will affect the museum’s maintenance of county historical archives, staffing and programming at Evergreen Cemetery and the Davenport Jail.
Porcella, along with several members of her staff, pleaded to the board of supervisors that even though the museum’s county contract is a small slice of its budget, it’s still a crucial revenue source as federal and state funding opportunities have dwindled.
She even noted that she’s taking another salary cut this year to help the museum’s finances and keep paying staff, many of whom were at Wednesday’s budget hearing.
“These are the sacrifices we made to preserve what we do because we really contribute significantly to the local economy,” Porcella said. “We attract tourists, support downtown businesses and enhance the county’s reputation as a place that values creativity and education.”
In all, supervisors heard in person from nearly 40 members of the arts community and more than a dozen tuning in remotely.
The Santa Cruz art scene is what brought District 3 Supervisor Justin Cummings back to the area after completing his doctorate program in Miami, he said.
“When I think about the arts, it’s not only appreciation for the arts and the work they do,” Cummings said. “Not only is it part of our culture, but it’s a huge part of our economy.”
Cummings and the rest of the board were clear that they did not want to cut arts funding, but were now faced with the challenge of where that money would come from in such a tight budget year, when every county department has made financial sacrifices.
“I’m incredibly sympathetic to where we are today because this isn’t where anybody wants to be,” said District 5 Supervisor Monica Martinez.
Martinez added that dipping into the county’s reserves to fill this gap wasn’t an option, but rather a risk for the county because there would be less money to pull from in an emergency.
The supervisors instructed Gaffney and his team to come back with a final budget plan next week that maintains the county’s respective contracts with the Arts Council and the MAH, which could include bringing back a proposal to close Simpkins Family Swim Center on Sundays for part of the year or increasing fees for county parks that are used as wedding venues.
County staff are now in a time crunch to figure out where to cut from the parks department’s already tight budget in time for the June 30 deadline, when the county’s budget needs to be approved.
“I want to remind the board that after June 30, there is no June 31,” said Martinez. “We need to pass a budget. There’s going to be difficult decisions, and this is just the beginning.”
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