Arts groups relieved to avoid state budget cuts

Advocates of the arts in Rhode Island are reasonably satisfied with funding allocations in the recently enacted fiscal 2012 state budget because, even though there are no increases, significant cuts were avoided in a contentious budget year.
“I’d like to think that artisans and artists’ organizations have proven they are an important part of the state’s economy and its economy recovery,” said Randall Rosenbaum, executive director of the R.I. State Council on the Arts. “The arts, literally, are part of the Rhode Island brand, one of the things the state is best known for, and the arts provide a great return on the state’s investment.”
Lisa Carnevale, executive director of Rhode Island Citizens for the Arts, a 300-member group based in Pawtucket, noted that the state budget level funds the arts for 2012, providing the same amount as last year, $600,000 for RISCA grants. It is not an ideal situation, she agreed, but better than it could have been because arts advocates successfully fought off a $100,000 cut proposed by Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee.
“The hurtful part of that cut is it would have come from [RISCA’s] discretionary-grants funding pool,” she said of money used to provide competitive grants to local artists and organizations.
As a result of the restored state funding, Rosenbaum said, his agency was able to provide 15 more grants than it could have otherwise, funds that he said went to community-based groups and local festivals.
In fiscal 2010, the most recent year for which complete data is available, 832 artists or groups applied for what would have been $5.7 million in RISCA grants, with 377 successfully winning the $2 million available in state and federal funds.
Each dollar in RISCA grant support generated $14.80 in total spending by arts organizations in fiscal 2010, Rosenbaum said, basing this ratio on information gathered from the final reports submitted to RISCA by grant recipients following completion of their projects. In addition to state funding, RISCA also relies on federal funding through the National Endowment for the Arts, which this year provides $750,300 to RISCA for grants and operations. Rosenbaum noted that RISCA received $68,000 more, a total of $818,000, from NEA in the previous fiscal year.
After Chafee proposed the $100,000 cut, the House Finance Committee restored the funding. Rhode Island Citizens for the Arts regularly notified supporters of each twist and turn in the arts-funding debate, urging them to contact their local legislators and testify at hearings. The effort apparently paid off. Arts advocates were “very active” in the critical final days of the session, Carnevale reported.
The motion-picture tax credit, which reimburses movie and television-show producers 25 percent of costs incurred in Rhode Island, managed to escape the budget ax, although the governor had proposed its elimination. The credit has a $15 million annual cap.
One proposal approved by the House but not the Senate would have created a new tax credit for musical and theatrical productions, providing producers 30 percent of the costs incurred in Rhode Island for original productions.
The measure was crafted to allow the Providence Performing Arts Center to attract first-run, pre-Broadway premieres of major productions eventually destined for New York, Los Angeles and other cities, Rosenbaum explained. But the credit also could have applied to certain local original productions at other theaters such as Trinity Repertory Co. and Theatre-By-the-Sea in Matunuck, he said. &#8226

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