When the bare-bones budget state lawmakers put together this week reaches Gov. Sam Brownback he is expected to kill the Kansas Arts Commission and do his best to kill public radio in Kansas.
These will not be fiscal decisions. Together, they don’t amount to a handful of loose change in a $14 billion budget. They are, instead, expressions of disdain for the arts and of political opposition to NPR.
Brownback says the arts commission — Kansas will be the only state in the union without one — will be replaced by a non-government foundation dependent on private donations.
Private donations work pretty well in rich, big cities. It is, however, worth noting that government has been supporting the arts in communities large and small for literally thousands of years. What taxpayers do today, kings and their courts did centuries ago.
Gov. Brownback’s anticipated veto of the $689,000 appropriation for the Kansas Arts Commission — an expenditure approved by the Senate and agreed to by the House — will cost the people of Kansas rather than save them money because it will eliminate state matching money for federal grants.
Iolans should take this personally. KAC grants and the matching money from Washington have been important to Bowlus Fine Arts Center programs. The KAC helped bring the Lyric Arts Trio to the Bowlus earlier this year in addition to paying 40 percent of the cost of recent storytellers, speakers, performers and artists who provide the programs for the Creitz Recital Hall series and the exhibits shown in the Mary Martin Art Gallery.
Those federal matching grants amount to more than the state “saves” by killing the KAC. Now, it’s true that the federal money is spent in places like Iola rather than Topeka. But the end result will be to weaken the Kansas economy a tad.
Good fiscal policy? No. Ideologically satisfying? It’s the only explanation.
PUBLIC RADIO will get the ax because ultra conservatives such as Brownback feel that PBS is too liberal in its news policies.
Eliminating the $1.5 million of state subsidy won’t put all of the PBS stations in Kansas out of business. Listeners who like classical music will donate a little more. Others who don’t feel contaminated by “All Things Considered” will also dig deeper.
But the Kansas lawmakers who voted to keep the PBS subsidy in the budget understand (1) there is no other source of classical music available to Kansas radio listeners and (2) many listeners don’t turn to talk radio for unbiased news. The fact is that the broadcast networks have gone through revolutionary changes over recent decades. They no longer hire news reporters and analysts. Only a very few metropolitan stations produce regular news broadcasts with their own professional staffs.
A traveler from Kansas City to Kanorado tuned in only to commercial stations hears a lot of country western music, useful weather reports, all of Rush Limbaugh and his fellow blowhards a normal listener can tolerate — very few minutes of solid news about the day’s events.
Public radio exists because the representatives of the American people at the national and state levels believe that spending public money to provide classical music and commentary on national and world affairs is appropriate and worthwhile. Gov. Brownback obviously doesn’t share those values. And he, acting alone, has the power to decide the matter for the other 3 million of us.
Kansas will be the poorer for these decisions.
— Emerson Lynn, Jr.
