Arts Council loses its listing on state tax form
A box California taxpayers could check on their state income tax returns to make donations to arts programs will disappear in 2013.
Forms for the 2010 and 2011 tax years had a checkoff box for the California Arts Council as one of 18 options for targeted giving to statefunded causes.
But it won’t be an option any longer. The state law that added the grant-making Arts Council to the mix for the two years specified that the box would vanish if it didn’t bring in at least $250,000 from tax returns filed for the 2011 tax year.
Through the end of November, the yield was $164,330 chipped in by 15,940 taxpayers, according to the Franchise Tax Board.
Craig Watson, the arts council’s director, says it’s not surprising the checkoff yield fell short.
Next to the box it said “Arts Council Fund,” and in his view, a box by almost any other name would have smelled more sweet to potential donors.
“You say ‘ Arts Council Fund,’ and it’s ‘who’s that and why would I give to that?’ Not everybody knows what the Arts Council is or what it does,” said Watson, who first held his job in July 2011, long after the tax check- off legislation was written and passed.
Watson said there’s nothing stopping the arts council from trying to get back on the tax form after sitting out a year, although it would take passing a new bill.
The next time around, he said, the label next to the box should say something like “Arts for Kids,” with a provision that all the money raised from tax form checkoffs would indeed go to children’s arts education.
Meanwhile, he said, arts council officials are brainstorming new ways to make it easier for California motorists to sign up for the specialty arts license plates that are the agency’s real donor-- funded meal ticket. The plates cost $50 extra for new ones and $40 for renewals, with most of the money going to the arts council, which is depending on them for half its $5.6-million budget for the current fiscal year.
As its stands now, Watson said, people can buy the license plates only for their own vehicles. Making them a gift option would be helpful, he said, adding that’s not the only tweak being studied.
Once a $30-million-ayear agency that carried some real grant-making clout, the arts council got butchered in 2002 and 2003 while Democrat Gray Davis was governor and never recovered. Since then, state taxpayers have kicked in $1 million a year, with the National Endowment for the Arts providing a $1-million match from federal coffers.
The state’s share comes to pennies per citizen, which reliably left California in last place in per capita taxpayer support for its state arts agency until this year, when Kansas claimed the bottom spot by axing all arts funding.
According to the most recent annual report posted on its website, the arts council issued $3.4 million in grants in 2010-11, or 9 cents per California resident. L.A.’s two government grantmaking agencies, the city’s Department of Cultur- al Affairs and the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, both match or exceed the statewide agency’s grantmaking power.
The California Arts Council’s top grant priority was arts education, with a program that sends artists into public schools accounting for $1.1 million. The strategy also favors smaller nonprofit arts organizations, which typically have a harder time finding donors than their bigger peers, and arts initiatives in rural and “underserved” areas that tend to have a less well-developed cultural infrastructure.