Protect region's rich culture with stable, assured funding

Oct. 25, 2007
Russell Cooke
Inquirer editorial writer

One thing Philadelphians have agreed on at Great Expectations forums this year: This city and region offer a smorgasbord of neat stuff to do. Whether it's the theater or a sporting event, a popular restaurant, an encounter with 18th-century history, or a stroll in Fairmount Park, citizens rave about the region's cultural assets.

That's one of the great expectations for the next mayor: to ensure that the show goes on, in all the forms it takes.

Putting arts, culture and historical treasures on sounder financial footing involves many tricky challenges. But payoffs are many. These could include providing a rallying point around which normally standoffish city and suburban leaders could unite, a shared agenda that's actually - wait for it - fun.

As a category, things-to-do is hands-down the biggest "plus" locals cite to an out-of-towner considering a visit or potential move to the area. Residents express an affection that is genuine and abiding for the broad range of free-time activities the city offers. No matter the neighborhood, from the Far Northeast to Wynnefield, forum participants said they visited the city's core regularly to sample its riches. Culture is not just a Society Hill/Main Line thing.

Being Philadelphians, of course, people also fret over the cultural health of the region. Not without reason. While it seems certain that the city's major sports franchises will be causing fans to cheer and groan for years to come, the financial underpinnings of other attractions are less secure.

As the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance reported last year, nearly half of the arts and cultural organizations in the region operate in the red. Among groups that cover their costs, margins are often "razor-thin," the cultural alliance study noted. When even the city's arts office has to close its doors, things are pretty shaky.

Survey the landscape, and it's clear this sector is too big and important to be allowed to falter. Culture generates an estimated $1.3 billion in spending by arts groups and their audiences, and it's a major draw for visitors - even, to some degree, for businesses. And if you talk to business CEOs, you'll find that cultural life ranks high on their lists of factors in locating an enterprise, right up there with tax climate. Why? The better the quality of life, the easier it is to attract a skilled workforce.

The hundreds of thousands of patrons who flock to the Philadelphia Museum of Art each year may not be as boisterous as Eagles fans at the Linc - but guess what. There are more of them. (And they always go home winners.) And as the city's stupendous Mural Arts Program shows every day, the arts have huge power to bond and uplift neighborhoods, and to inspire change.

The Great Expectations project harvested enough ideas on culture to keep the next mayor busy full-time.

No surprise, citizens like free and reduced-price events as a way to build buy-in and to thank the public. They'd like even more online help in finding what's going on. They want better transportation links to destinations like the Philadelphia Zoo.

Citizens particularly like the idea of low-cost events for children. Just like arts leaders, they want to nurture the next generation of culture vultures. (Along with resurrecting the city arts office, mayoral favorite Michael Nutter is thinking along these lines with his proposal for two tickets to a cultural event per year for every school-age child.)

Citizens also support the one big-picture idea that remains so elusive: a dedicated, regional source of cultural funding.

Mark it down as just another big idea from elsewhere that Philadelphia has yet to import and adapt. Denver has created a regional arts fund; Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) has a broad "regional assets" fund.

Here, a strong push in the 1990s actually built suburban support for using sales-tax revenue to feed a cultural fund. The effort foundered upon the city's reluctance to give up any of its tax revenue for the cause. Since then, the idea of a regional culture fund has become almost a political third rail.

Now, however, the evidence of the economic pop and spiritual nourishment that the arts bring to the region has mounted, from the glittering Avenue of the Arts to the many neighborhood arts centers and theaters. The time for a new push for a regional fund may be here.

While the next mayor could pursue any number of incremental strategies to enhance the city's cultural life, the most powerful legacy would be to help build a coalition to tackle this big task.

Any regional leader who summoned to center stage a stable fund to back cherished arts and cultural institutions would put his name in lights for years to come.