LA FACES MORE ARTS LAYOFFS; PAID INTERNSHIP PROGRAM PRESERVED
The city’s department of cultural affairs will lose seven staff members on April 1, with more cuts expected by July 1 as the weight of huge projected citywide budget deficits begins to hit home, reports the Los Angeles Times.
The cuts include the directors of the Warner Grand Theater in San Pedro and the William Grant Still Arts Center in West Adams. Olga Garay, the department’s executive director, says she’ll try to shuffle remaining staff to keep those facilities open.
Both are on a list of nine city-owned arts centers where the government hopes to lay off staff and recruit private nonprofit groups to take over as operators.
Supporters of two arts centers in Hollywood’s Barnsdall Park and two others next to the Watts Towers already have told a committee of the City Council that they’re concerned about the haste of the privatization plan; the full council will likely get an earful at its meeting on Wednesday.
In related news, Los Angeles County’s ten-year policy of paying the salaries of college students who serve internships in the management offices of local arts nonprofits will survive into an eleventh summer, after a board of supervisors vote Tuesday to spend $250,000 to save the program in scaled-down form, reports the Los Angeles Times.
“It’s a new crop of potential arts leaders, and there’s no smarter way to make such an investment,” said board member Mark Ridley-Thomas. Mike Antonovich and Zev Yaroslavsky also voted to continue the program; Gloria Molina was opposed, and Don Knabe abstained.
Molina said that given today’s budget pressures, she wants the program funded by donors or retooled into an unpaid internship for college students; she would rather have arts organizations take advantage of funds the county received under last year’s federal economic stimulus package, which calls for hiring unemployed workers rather than collegians.
The paid internships are “a wonderful thing if you have the money,” Molina said.
