Jonathon Glus, the executive director of the Commission for Arts and Civilization, which is responsible for overseeing the city's grants to arts organizations. / Photo by Vito Di Stefano
Jonathon Glus, the executive director of the Committee for Arts and Culture, which is responsible for overseeing the city'due south grants to arts organizations. / Photo past Vito Di Stefano

This post originally appeared in the April eleven Politics Written report . Become the Politics Written report delivered to your inbox .

Two weeks ago in the Politics Report (a "week" is a measurement of time demarcated by seven days and it has been two of those since the written report we're discussing came out — but to help y'all get situated if you, like us, could use some guide posts to mark the passage of time), nosotros reviewed some of the decisions the city and county were going to accept to make soon.

One of the biggest is coming upwards: San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer has the fun task right now of preparing both a mid-yr modification to the budget and a draft of adjacent year's upkeep. A upkeep, to review, is a programme for how you will spend money in the coming year and what limitations urban center managers have in how they spend it. Simply it is based on how the economy is going to perform and how much the metropolis government will brand from that.

And we really take no idea what the economic system is going to do and the people who do brand those estimations are existence real downers these days.

And then estimating what the tax revenue will exist for a city is brutal. But we do know it'southward bad so y'all can simply decide to assume city budgeting is going to be really painful. The mayor's going to take to realign last year's expectation and so plan side by side yr'south.

Nosotros'll be watching what cuts he aims for closely.

But knowing information technology'southward going to be bad, we started the discussion two weeks agone well-nigh what kinds of things may be done, and we talked to Councilman Chris Cate, who mentioned, among many other things, possibly cutting back on the arts. The city gives grants to many nonprofits to help with events and capital expenses that drive civilization and tourism in San Diego.

Well, nosotros heard from the arts community:To be more specific, we got a letter from Matt Carney and Alan Ziter, the co-chair and past co-chair, respectively, of the San Diego Regional Arts and Culture Coalition. They would like you to know that the urban center has made many commitments to the urban center'southward civilisation and funding went down the last year, contrary to Cate's betoken about how much more the city had invested in it.

Several years agone, the City Council and former Mayor Jerry Sanders made a commitment to direct about 10 percent of the transient occupancy tax (which is a 10.5 pct levy on hotel bills) to arts organizations that support some of the tourism that pays for those taxes.

Carney and Ziter said it may exist more than earlier but non close to that goal. "His argument does not tell the whole story and takes a hit at an economic sector that is fighting to sustain jobs while offer cultural enrichment in every neighborhood in San Diego," they wrote of Cate's comments.

Cate responded to their letter:Cate best-selling that last year the groups got slightly less than the year before. But he pointed out that arts groups got more than than forty pct more than in last year's budget than they got 5 years agone. And they got that even in years when other departments had to brand cuts.

"Unfortunately in these unprecedented times with millions unemployed, astringent drops in tourism and sales tax revenues, and thousands of businesses potentially beingness shuttered, the urban center will have to make very hard decisions with very limited resources," Cate said in an electronic mail.

Scott Lewis oversees Voice of San Diego's operations, website and daily functions as Editor in Chief. He too writes about local politics, where he ofttimes... More by Scott Lewis