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It’s perhaps fitting that D.C.’s main agency focused on funding local theaters (and other arts organizations) is surrounded by so much drama. But the frequency with which the Commission on the Arts and Humanities has courted controversy is still a bit hard to believe.
It was just two years ago, after all, that the commission, which controls a roughly $40 million grant budget to assist local arts organizations, was in the middle of a pair of bruising fights centered on thorny questions about racial equity in the arts. Two Council votes brought the temperature down on those debates temporarily, but Loose Lips hears that tensions have started rising once again in the run-up to the final budget vote Tuesday.
Specifically, the commission’s staff and some of its mayor-appointed commissioners have begun raising concerns that Council Chair Phil Mendelson is advancing legislation that they believe would undermine the changes to arts funding in 2021 intended to distribute grant money more equitably.
Arts commissioners specifically worry about two provisions backed by Mendelson: The first would set aside 9 percent of the commission’s budget (about $5 million annually) to seed a new fund aimed at paying for large capital projects for theaters and other arts groups; the other provision restricts organizations from using grants from the commission to account for the majority of their budgets.
“It just seems like a very cynical move, finding a backdoor way of turning back the clock,” says Natalie Hopkinson, an American University professor and former City Paper contributor who Mendelson tried (and failed) to keep off the commission two years ago. “It’s a slap in the face. The brazenness is just so shocking here.”
They fear that Mendelson, who they saw as their chief antagonist in what has become a recurring fight, is once again listening to large, well-established arts organizations at the expense of smaller ones, and privileging wealthier White artists over people of color struggling to get their own initiatives off the ground.
Hopkinson is perhaps predisposed to be suspicious of Mendelson after the battle over her 2021 re-nomination to the commission got so heated. She and fellow nominee Cora Masters Barry, widow of the mayor-for-life and an activist in her own right, accused Mendelson of a mix of racism and sexism in his attempt to block their appointments; Mendo believed they had “antagonized and alienated” their commission colleagues before the Council voted overwhelmingly to appoint them anyway.
But this latest dispute goes beyond past grudges. Commission Chair Reggie Van Lee and Executive Director Aaron Myers wrote a joint letter to Mendelson and the rest of the Council on May 24 raising many of the same concerns as Hopkinson, according to a copy forwarded to LL.
The previous funding fight focused on how best to shift money to smaller groups and away from larger, more established (and yes, Whiter) organizations, which once received roughly a third of all the grant money the commission controlled. Accordingly, Mendelson’s changes feel like a step backward to Van Lee and his colleagues.
“Because only a relatively small number of organizations would be eligible for the large capital grant program, the subsequent reduction in funding for other grant programs becomes a significant equity issue,” Van Lee and Myers wrote, noting that the capital grants would likely “only be accessible to less than 20 organizations” because of the $900,000 minimum currently contemplated for the expenditures. And they believe this dynamic is “exacerbated” by Mayor Muriel Bowser’s decision to cap how much money the commission can receive each year from a dedicated sales tax meant to fund its operations, a move designed to address other budget pressures that Mendelson eventually supported.
After all the unpleasantness of the past few years (astute City Paper readers may also recall the humorous episode where Bowser briefly locked commission staff out of the agency’s own vault of public art), many in the art world are hoping things don’t escalate this time around. “Nobody wants to revisit this fight,” laments Amy Austin, CEO and president of Theatre Washington, who served as City Paper’s publisher years ago.
Count Mendelson among those trying to turn down the temperature. He told reporters last week that he would meet with Van Lee and other councilmembers to try and address their concerns; LL hears that Ward 5 Councilmember Zachary Parker and At-Large Councilmember Robert White, who led the effort to secure Hopkinson and Barry’s spots on the commission two years ago, have been among those involved in these discussions so far.
But, while Mendelson tinkered slightly with the exact funding formula for the capital grants in the latest version of legislation supporting the budget circulated Monday afternoon, it appears that he fundamentally still believes in the wisdom of his proposal. “The Council continues to get requests from organizations for large capital grants,” Mendelson says. “And because of the way we’d restructured grantmaking a couple of years ago, we have not been able to do that.”
Austin believes the current way the city funds such large construction projects isn’t exactly beneficial for smaller organizations at the moment, so this change would actually help level the playing field. In many ways, the District government still operates as it did when former Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans, who represented many big theaters downtown and controlled the city’s purse strings via his powerful finance committee, still dominated these debates.
Before Evans was forced off the Council in scandal, basically any arts organization had to appeal to him directly to find some funding for major repair or renovation work. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this privileged organizations that knew how the system worked (particularly those close with Evans directly). Austin hopes Mendelson’s changes present a “clearer path” for how organizations can receive funding.
“Capital grants can fund repairs, but they can also help create new spaces, especially with all this talk about having to rejuvenate the downtown core,” says Edgar Dobie, executive producer at Arena Stage. As he spoke with LL, the fire alarm at his Navy Yard theater began ringing loudly and forced him outside. He says such false alarms are not uncommon for the aging system, and the incident functioned as a convenient way to support Dobie’s claims that even larger organizations like his have major repair needs they can’t support on their own.
“Economics isn’t everything, but if, say, the [Shakespeare Theatre Company] is bringing in 100,000 people to the city, and those people are eating out, shopping in downtown…then the city should absolutely contribute to that,” says Gerry Widdicombe, who has served on the boards of a variety of large arts groups, including Woolly Mammoth Theatre, the Capital Fringe Festival, and Theatre Washington. He also helps run the Downtown D.C. Business Improvement District, though he stresses he’s speaking in his personal capacity here.
Widdicombe suggests that the commission could set up a “professional review committee” stocked with representatives from big and small organizations to balance equity concerns as the funds are distributed, or dedicate a certain portion of the capital fund to smaller groups. Mendelson said the commission would likely have the final say in setting up how the grant program would work, but he’s supportive of the concept, in general.
“Equity is important, and they can use these large capital grants to impose equity requirements, like to membership of their board or [to ensure] that they’re partnering with a small organization, or how much BIPOC participation there is in the programming,” Mendelson says. “There’s a lot of different ways to promote equity as a condition for these large capital grants.”
Hopkinson charges, however, that this set-up would be a “180 degree turn away from equity.” She says Mendelson’s suggestions are inadequate compared to simply keeping the current funding structure, which sets more grant money aside for organizations with budgets under $1 million. “You could fund those organizations for generations and they still wouldn’t catch up,” Hopkinson says.
She suspects that Mendelson’s proposal is mainly meant to satisfy larger groups that were upset to see less commission cash head their way after the Council agreed to the funding changes two years ago. She notes that the director of one of the more influential organizations—Paul Tetreault of Ford’s Theatre—made his plans to press the Council to keep the money flowing perfectly clear in emails leaked to City Paper back in 2021. The organization continues to employ influential ArentFox Schiff lobbyist Jon Bouker to lobby on its behalf, city records show, just as it did back when the debate was hottest; Tetreault did not respond to a request for comment.
“They’ve said that they would regroup and come at this another way, and it’s exactly what they’ve done,” Hopkinson says.
Hopkinson expects that the Council chair’s proposal to steer the commission’s grant money toward capital projects will act as a double whammy with the move to limit how much of an organization’s budget can come from commission grants. Van Lee and Myers noted in their letter that research suggest that “many smaller-budget organizations, a number of which are BIPOC-lead, often have a larger median overhead rate than larger-budget organizations, making the need for funding in excess of 50 percent of the organization’s budget even more critical.”
Mendelson counters that the requirement “good grantsmanship,” ensuring that the government doesn’t fund groups that can’t fundraise enough to exist on their own.
“An organization that is that dependent is at risk in a downturn of basically being put out of business,” Mendelson says.
Austin, for one, is hopeful that everyone involved can hash out their differences a bit more productively than in years past. She agrees with the need to scrutinize how government funding is distributed, but she would rather see officials set aside a bigger pot of money for the arts broadly instead of forcing organizations to squabble over who gets what.
“I would like everyone to move away from the dynamic of us vs. them,” Austin says. “It paints an unfair picture of the whole landscape.”
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