you, your org, and/or your industry?"
Terry Olson
Orange County Arts & Cultural Affairs
The economic slow down, along with a number of tax cuts put through in the past few years, results in the State of Florida having less revenue (probably A LOT less) . . .so . . . they will probably continue to give unfunded mandates to local governments and also continue to find ways to cut the property taxes (which are the main revenue of local governments.) That means that next year Orange County Government may have to cut A LOT of money out of its budget.
It if does, that could mean cuts in the funding of "outside agencies". United Arts is the primary "outside agency" receiving funding from the General Fund. For about 18 years they received $1 for every citizen in the County (over $1 million). In the last two years that has been cut to about 77 cents per citizen or around $780,000. That could go away completely or be cut more drastically next year.
We have been able to make up the cut with money from our Tourist Development tax that was appropriated to invest in the arts in primarily two other programs (Cultural Tourism and Facilities). And since the program was fairly new and the Tourist Development Tax has been growing steadily the money taken from there to make up the loss in our general funding of United Arts wasn't felt too hard, but it was taken from money we would have invested in the arts in some other way. Next year, it may come down to a question of which funding program is better for the community as a whole - funding through United Arts or the Cultural Tourism or Facilities programs.
Hope that wasn't too confusing. Things could be pretty awful, but there are a number of options on how to deal with the anticipated shortfall in the least painful way. As a whole our arts community is looking at "negative growth" for the first time in 20 years. Never-the-less we keep turning out great artistic works.