LONG BEACH CITY COUNCIL WILL CONSIDER LAWS TO HELP LOCAL ARTS
Members of the Long Beach City Council hope to get City Hall off the backs of working artists, street performers, and informal arts venues while impaneling a new commission to brainstorm ways to boost the city government’s funding of the arts, reports Mike Boehm for the Los Angeles Times. Pegged as an “Arts and Cultural Initiative for Long Beach,” the package of proposals comes from six of the nine council members, although not all are sponsors of every element. The council is expected to take them up at its March 2 meeting.
The changes, council member Robert Garcia noted in a statement yesterday announcing the proposed overhaul of existing policies, “come out of months of discussions with arts advocates, who helped identify [laws] that are obsolete or not conducive to a thriving urban arts community.”
One change would excuse artists from having to pay the city’s annual business-license fee unless their earnings topped a certain threshold. The sponsors say Los Angeles waives license fees for artists who gross less than $300,000, while Seal Beach, the Orange County community that borders Long Beach, does the same for artists who gross up to $20,000.
The potentially furthest-reaching proposal would establish a panel of as many as nine members with “proven expertise” in the arts, business, finance, and nonprofit management to generate ideas for boosting city funding of the arts and for improving how those funds are allocated. It would have ninety days to brainstorm and report back to the city council.
The council recently cut annual funding for the Long Beach Museum of Art from $569,000 to $169,000––partly because of tight municipal finances, but also because City Hall was unhappy over having to pay off $3 million in construction bonds after the museum’s private-nonprofit board had failed to deliver on a promise to retire the bonds with its own fund-raising. Funding for the city government’s arts agency, the Arts Council for Long Beach, also has been reduced over the past two years.
