Well, he did it.
Despite the expressed will of the Kansas Legislature and repeated, earnest requests from thousands of individual Kansans, Gov. Sam Brownback eliminated funding for the Kansas Arts Commission with a line-item veto Saturday.
He defends his defiance of the Republican-dominated Legislature by calling it budget cutting. This is so much unadulterated hogwash. The appropriation he vetoed represented less than one-hundredth of 1 percent of the general fund budget.
Killing the arts commission to save the budget is akin to solving a family budget crisis by taking away a six-year-old’s two-bits-a-week allowance. It not only won’t work, it’s just flat mean.
Not only is arts funding less than half a drop in the budget bucket, killing the commission also will kill the source of matching funds for federal arts grants. The Bowlus Fine Arts Center cultural attractions program stands to lose as much as $18,500 because Gov. Brownback doesn’t give a fig about the arts. And, of course, Allen is just one of the state’s 105 counties. Altogether, Kan-sas stands to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal arts support the governor decided, unilaterally, that we shouldn’t have.
(THE MONEY WILL GO to other states. Kansas taxpayers will still pay their share. The other states won’t give us a word of thanks.)
Not to worry, says Gov. Sam. The arts will flourish with a flood of money from private donations.
Private donations do make up a significant part of funding for the arts. Perhaps most of our nation’s art museums were established by benefactors such as William R. Nelson of Kansas City. The great concert halls in our metropolises were built with contributions and the performances in them continue to be subsidized. There is also taxpayer support, to be sure, but the fact is that the fine arts and the cultural arts don’t generate big bucks. It takes a combination of public and private support to keep the arts vital.
The Bowlus Fine Arts Center and its enormously successful cultural arts program provide a good example.
Created by the will of Thomas H. Bowlus, who left it in trust to the school district to be operated for the cultural enlightenment of the children of Iola and to the citizens at large, the Bowlus has been supported by the county, by the City of Iola, USD 257, and literally hundreds of area individuals.
The Sleeper Family Trust, the Whitehead Trust and the Stephenson Trust add very significantly to the yearly revenue produced by the Bowlus Trust and make it possible for the Bowlus Center to present nationally known performers at affordable ticket prices. Contributions to the Center through the Friends of the Bowlus organization have paid for hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and repairs to the building.
But please note, this has been a public-private joint effort from the get-go. The Kansas Arts Commission has been a part of it; a small part, but an important part.
It will be missed because it has been a connection with the national arts commission and with other state arts commissions across the county. And because relationships between arts commissions and arts patrons generate ideas and reinforce enthusiasms, Kansas should ignore its anti-arts governor and lay the groundwork, beginning now, for the revival of the Kansas Arts Commission.
Until it is born again, Kansans must bear the shame of living in the only state among the 50 which has officially turned its back on culture.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
N.B. Don’t take it personally, dear reader. The decision, after all, was that of only one man; one man who doesn’t listen to others.
