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Arts & Entertainment

Parks, Arts Boosters Fight City Budget Cuts

Atlanta's arts and parks communities converged on City Hall this week to lobby for their causes

A proposed city of Atlanta budget cut to arts and parks attracted creative protestors and park volunteer veterans to City Hall this week. They argued the relatively tiny sliver of city money that they usually get delivers outsized returns to Atlanta.

"Normally we don't see this kind of participation unless someone's thinking about raising your taxes," marveled city Councilwoman Yolanda Adrean as she opened the public hearing for Atlanta's budget in front of some 50 people.

Chris Appleton, Executive Director of WonderRoot, told the hearing that if Atlanta wants to grow art and associated businesses, "the city must invest in nonprofit cultural institutions."

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In 2004, Appleton co-founded WonderRoot, now a Memorial Drive artists' workspace, exhibition venue and host of hundreds of public art classes over the last few years.

His group is one of 63 that received grants from Atlanta's Office of Cultural Affairs in the fiscal year ending this June. The year's total comes to $470,000 in grants to individual artists, to large and small organizations and for specific projects.  But next year's draft budget cuts that by half.

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A grant budget of $235,000  "will not make Atlanta competitive city for tourists, international corporations or residents," he opined.

Indeed, Louis Corrigan said his company might prefer to base him in California, but he's staying down South: "The reason I'm here is I love Atlanta's arts community." He's also the founder of Flux Projects, which creates temporary artworks throughout the city. In May, for example, they're putting on a dance performance in the water fountain at Centennial Olympic Park.

Angela Harris is worried that small groups will fall through the cracks. "With these proposed cuts there are only 30 organizations that will receive funding and I'm sure the smallest of us will be the ones not receiving it," said Harris, executive director of Dance Canvas, an Auburn Avenue nonprofit dance company that takes on works by emerging choreographers.

The cuts "in the scheme of things is a tiny amount of money, except it's a huge amount of money  for the impact it will make in the arts," she concluded.

Park boosters are no happier with a proposed cut that would cut funding for eight positions in the parks department and would hamper maintenance. It would also slow down the city fight against non-native invasive plant species. Think kudzu: imported plants that swallow trees and buildings whole. Or privet, a fast-growing shrub that blocks sight lines and can hide indiscreet activities.

Margaret Connelly is executive director of Park Pride, a nonprofit that organizes volunteers and helps maintain parks citywide.

The cuts will become a safety issue, she predicted: "We'll see more trash, we'll see more weeds, we'll see more invasives."

Even one year of deferred maintenance takes a long time to recover from, Connelly said.

Her colleague, President Sarah Yates Sutherland, added the proposed budget does not maintain parks to the level that would attract donors. If the city's seen as shirking, it's harder to attract volunteers.

Atlanta's budget next year would total $546 million under the draft by Mayor Kasim Reed. That's some $13.5 million less than the year ending this June 30. There will be new spending on 100 new police officers among other things. Besides parks and arts, other cuts will come from a 3 percent pay decrease for the city's top earners and other administrative belt-tightening measures.

Besides all that, the city has a "backlog" of some $1 billion in infrastructure works it needs to do, noted city CFO Joya De Foor.

After about two hours of public testimony, Councilwoman Felicia Moore thanked the audience for their interest and noted that her e-mail box is full of notes from arts boosters. But the veteran councilwoman pointed out that a cut must come somewhere, asking the audience to "dig a little deeper in the budget and find some areas that could be cut," if they want to keep arts and parks money.

City Council will finish hearing budget pitches from city departments by next week. Then they deliberate and can make adjustments to the budget, which must finally be passed in June.

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