Grant applications for arts postponed, agency head says

The state Department of Parks, Heritage and Tourism has postponed accepting applications for arts grants until it asks lawmakers to give the agency the authority to spend the money, department Secretary Stacy Hurst said Friday.

The department’s Arkansas Arts Council announced May 15 that it received $441,500 in federal funds from the National Endowment for the Arts for covid-19 relief for nonprofit arts organizations. Awards would range from $1,000 to $15,000.

Hurst said the department hopes to win approval for the spending authority during the Legislative Council’s meeting Wednesday.

“It is not an unusual thing that we are doing when we get supplemental funds from an existing federal grantor,” Hurst said in an interview.

“But I certainly I am sensitive to doing it correctly at this point in time,” Hurst said. “Everything is so fluid. We are just trying to get the funds as quickly as we can to these 501(c)(3) arts organizations because they can be used for things like job retention for salaries, to pay rents, those sort of things. I am hopeful that everyone agrees this is a good way to do it.”

House Speaker Matthew Shepherd, R-El Dorado, said Hurst could have sought approval of an appropriation for these grants on an emergency basis through the co-chairmen of the Legislative Council and its Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review Subcommittee. But some lawmakers have started frowning on that process.

The council’s meeting Wednesday will provide Hurst a good opportunity to present her request for spending authority, Shepherd said. He said a few lawmakers had inquired about the department’s plans.

Senate President Pro Tempore Jim Hendren, R-Sulphur Springs, said he’s received no complaints from lawmakers about the department’s plans.

Hurst originally announced May 15 that the Arkansas Arts Council would begin accepting applications May 18 and the application deadline would be this Friday.

“The application period will be well publicized [and] open for two weeks and we’ll note that no grants will be made until the Legislature has granted proper approvals,” she wrote in a May 15 email to lawmakers.

Department officials will ask the Legislative Council’s Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review Subcommittee for the appropriation to dispense the grant money at the subcommittee’s regular meeting in June, Hurst said in that email.

Then Hurst wrote in another email on May 18 to lawmakers that “in order to more fully allow time for public notice and to best accommodate a complete legislative review process, we have pushed back the opening for National Endowment for the Arts/Arkansas Arts Council grant applications to Wednesday May 20th at noon and have extended the application period to Monday June 1st at 5 p.m.”

At that point, the department had planned to seek emergency approval for the appropriation for the grants, department spokeswoman Melissa Whitfield said.

Hurst said Friday that she now hopes to begin accepting applications if the Legislative Council on Wednesday approves the spending authority.

She explained that the $441,500 in federal funds from the National Endowment for the Arts supplements the several hundred thousand dollars a year that the Arkansas Arts Council already receives from the endowment.

“We have existing rules that we will use to subgrant the funds out to a very limited population, 501(c)(3) arts organizations, so our [initial] thinking was that in order to get the money as quickly as possible into the hands of recipients that we could open just the application portal to determine the pool of applicants,” Hurst said. “We (made) no promises about grant awards. We clearly [defined] that everything would have to have legislative approval before awards were granted.

“That was our thinking that we would be able to do that,” Hurst said.

After preliminary calls to some legislators, she said she thought “that that was going to be OK.

“They would prefer that we get the appropriation first, which is perfectly understandable and great with us, because it actually will allow us to get the grant funds out more quickly,” Hurst said.

The state Department of Commerce drew criticism over accepting applications for about an hour on April 29 for the Arkansas Ready for Business grant program, financed with federal coronavirus relief funds, without first securing legislative approval for an appropriation for the program.

The Commerce Department later won legislative approval for the needed appropriation and accepted applications for two more days.

Hurst said she hasn’t received any complaints from lawmakers about the arts grant program.

“There was some back and forth, quite honestly, about should we ask for an emergency appropriation, which I did not want to do,” she said. “But this will be a better way to wait and get on that May 27th [Legislative Council] agenda and then open the portal after that.”

She said that after receiving approval for the spending authority, the department will leave the application portal open for 10 days and “then we’ll be able to make grants … hopefully in this fiscal year.” Fiscal 2020 ends June 30.

The $441,500 grant that the Arkansas Arts Council is administering is out of the $75 million that Congress appropriated to the National Endowment for the Arts as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act.