Pennsylvania Senate votes to restore funds for arts group

The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, whose 2012 program budget was cut 70 percent by the State House of Representatives, seems to have dodged a bullet: The Senate restored almost all the funding in its amended budget.

As the House prepared to vote on the amended budget Wednesday, Jenny L. Hershour, managing director of the advocacy group Citizens for the Arts in Pennsylvania, said: "A lot of arts advocates made a lot of telephone calls and sent a lot of e-mails on behalf of arts funding."

In his $27.3 billion budget, Gov. Corbett had proposed flat funding for the arts council: $9.2 million, or 0.03 percent of the whole. That figure already marked a big decline from the council's $15 million budget of only three years ago.

But the House apparently thought $9.2 million was still too much and took an ax to the council, hitting its grant-making budget particularly hard: Corbett had proposed $8.6 million; the House voted for $2.5 million. If that budget had held, Pennsylvania would have ranked 46th of the 50 states in per-capita arts funding.

In the fiscal year just ending, the council made 1,322 grants to 596 arts organizations and supported 726 arts projects statewide.

The budget as amended by the Senate restores most of the council's total budget, bringing it to $9.14 million - shy of Corbett's proposed $9.2 million, but a long way from what the House initially approved. Grant-making funds in the Senate version were brought up to about $8.18 million.

Senate leaders in both parties said restoration of at least some of the council's budget was on their list of budget to-dos, so it is not surprising that the funding was restored.

"The cultural sector had been hit by several years of deep cuts and eliminations," said Tom Kaiden, president of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance.

He speculated that there might be "a growing understanding in Harrisburg that arts and culture are crucial to Pennsylvania's economy, our tax base, community engagement, and preparing our kids to compete."

What remains a mystery, however, is how and why the House cut the budget so drastically. Many rank-and-file legislators said they did not even realize the cuts had been made until after the House had approved them.

That is not as far-fetched as it seems at first glance: The council's budget is extremely small, comparatively, consisting of only two line items out of total of more than 700.

Chuck McIlhinney, a Republican senator who represents parts of Bucks and Montgomery Counties and is a member of the arts council, said Wednesday that "House leaders felt they wanted to make those cuts, and we [in the Senate] weren't so inclined."

Said McIlhinney: "To zero [the council] out . . . puts the whole arts community back for years."