Cultural Institutions Say They're Suffering Under City Budget Cuts

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. I didn't know until this morning about this trees map that we're giving away. I didn't know this until this morning about glamping as a contest. It's a coincidence because I did know that we were going to have the president of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden on the show, that's Adrian Benepe. Why? Leaders of the city's cultural institutions have come together to ask Mayor Adams to what they call, stop cutting culture.

At issue here is the mayor's budget for the new fiscal year, which begins in July. He's proposing $53 million in cuts to nonprofit museums, performing arts centers, historical societies, zoos, and botanical gardens that receive city funding. The plea to stop cutting culture is a plea to restore that $53 million. In a letter to the mayor, this coalition of leaders says, "Our city's recovery is significant but fragile, and it cannot withstand uncertainty and continued cuts to culture."

We're going to talk now with leaders from two of the cultural representatives included in this coalition. One is Adrian Benepe. Some of you may remember former New York City Parks Commissioner, now president of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and Regina Bain, executive director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum. Great institution in Queens, in case you didn't know that existed. Adrian, welcome back. Regina, welcome to WNYC.

Regina: Thank you.

Adrian: Thank you. Great to be back, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Regina, you want to start maybe by way of introduction? Give people a 20 or 30-second introduction or elevator pitch for Louis Armstrong House Museum.

Regina: Why? Yes, I would. The Louis Armstrong House Museum, amazing trumpeter born in New Orleans, but lived for 30 years in Corona, Queens. His home is now a national landmark, and we give tours through that home. We just opened the new Armstrong Center last year, a brand new 14,000 square foot, $26 million facility with a jazz club, with an exhibit curated by Jason Moran. With the 60,000-piece Armstrong Archives, the largest of any jazz musician, it's doubled our visitorship, and we would welcome any of you to come.

Brian Lehrer: I will note that I said Louie, you said Louis?

Regina: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: That's the preferred pronunciation, even though people said, "Louie," a lot in his lifetime.

Regina: It is. When you listen to Hello Dolly, he says, "Hello, Dolly. It's Louis, Dolly." We take his lead, but of course, he was born in New Orleans. French culture, Louie is acceptable, too.

Brian Lehrer: Adrian Benepe, who else is included in this coalition asking the mayor to reverse that $53 million cut?

Adrian: [clears throat] Brian, you've got the 34 cultural institutions. Those are the museums and cultural institutions, the zoos, botanical gardens, performing arts centers that all have in common, they're on city land. The buildings are owned by the city, but the collections, like the paintings and stuff like that, the performances are put on by nonprofit boards that run these things. They receive direct city operational funding and then capital funding as conditions allow.

It does by no means covers all of the costs. It ranges anywhere from maybe 20% for some institutions to probably less than 2% for others, but it's crucial money. The problem is, it's been stagnant for 16 years and it has not gone up with inflation, so effectively, the city has been slowly defunding culture, which is perhaps our most important calling card.

Brian Lehrer: How do you compete against other worthy causes that rely on city funding? Mayor Adams has been clear about the financial challenges faced by the city. The budget is the budget. Unlike the federal government, as you know, Adrian, as a former commissioner, the city is required to balance its budget each year, and you're competing with libraries which want their cuts restored.

You're competing with social service agencies that want their cuts restored, not to mention some of the other big departments that get much more city funding than the cultural organizations, the public schools, police and fire, et cetera, et cetera. How do you make your case in these relative terms?

Adrian: Well, that's a good question. I also want to add, in addition to the 34 cultural institutions, there's about a thousand cultural programs or more, maybe several thousand, mostly neighborhood-based performing arts, fine arts, dance companies. That would include the Louis Armstrong House Museum. Some of them get direct funding through the Cultural Affairs Department called CDF or Cultural Development Fund. That's the coalition. It's the big, larger cultural institutions, and it's also the cultural programs.

I'll use this metaphor. I was trying to think of a simple metaphor. Let's pretend that all the city agencies that just get funding that don't generate revenue are getting an allowance, and the really big ones get a lot of allowance. They get $10, like the Department of Education, or $5, like the Police Department.

The cultural institutions, however, they don't really get an allowance. They go out and earn their own money. They earn $0.90 of every dollar they spend or $0.50 of every dollar they spend, and they get a tiny little encouragement from the city. In the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens case, our budget is around $30 million in a good year. We may get up to $5 million from the city in a good year. This year, it's only 3 million with the cuts, so we're down to 10% of our revenue coming from the city.

That means for every dollar we get from the city, we're raising $9 from the private sector in donations and earned revenue, in weddings that we put on, so we are generating thousands of jobs. How many thousands of jobs? 16,000 full-time jobs, plus 6,000 jobs for PDM, per diem, employees. 6,000 thousand of those jobs are union jobs DC 37 members, and we generate $110 billion for the economy.

In other words, we are the only city-funded service funded in a tiny rounding error way that delivers a return on investment of billions of dollars. It's really a classic example of penny-wise, pound-foolish to cut something that's earning the city billions of dollars.

Brian Lehrer: Regina, maybe with the Louis Armstrong House Museum as one example, it might be good to remind the listeners that so many cultural institutions around the world, not just around New York City, do rely on government funding. If it's mass-market entertainment, it can make a profit.

If it's something different, arts and culture, things that need to be preserved or promoted like the legacy of Louis Armstrong, for whatever reason that don't turn a profit, governments around the world do this. It's not a controversial proposal, so talk about how you see the relationship between government funding and the culture of a city, a country, or a world.

Regina: In order for us to exist, we have to be supported at every level, government, institutions, individuals. As Adrian said, I want to reiterate $110 billion in economic activity in New York is generated by the cultural economy. That's 13% of the city's economic activity. It's an economic imperative that cultural institutions are supported.

We are one of 1,800 nonprofit museums, theaters, zoos, botanic gardens, and we partner, for example, with 82% of New York City Public Schools as a group. When we're talking about funding art and culture, art is a part of culture. It's a part of the culture of New York City to have educators, students, senior citizens be a part of culture in New York City. It's incredibly important that that is funded on every level, including city funding.

Brian Lehrer: I realize it's hard to generalize when you're talking about so many different cultural institutions, but how would you say generally that the culture sector is coming back from the pandemic?

Regina: For us, for example, our visitorship has doubled since the opening of the center, and we know that culture was absolutely critical during the pandemic for gathering, for mental health, for young people, for us to deal with what was happening to us, with us. Culture serves that role in our society and continues to serve that role as we continue to try and rebound. Art has been serving our communities, and the demand is high, but although our visitorship has doubled, our staffing has not. That's part of the challenge.

There is a demand for the services that we have in our schools, in our senior citizens, and we want to meet that demand, but we don't have the staffing. We don't have the resources to do that, and that's not just us, it's others as well. There's a desire to meet the needs of our community, and we need the help to make sure that happens.

Brian Lehrer: Adrian, where--

Adrian: Right. [clears throat]

Brian Lehrer: Well, go ahead, what you were going to say. Go ahead.

Adrian: You were saying looking across the sector where who's done better than others. The outdoor museums, like the zoos and botanical gardens, we were able to reopen first after the pandemic when everybody was shut down, and we all lost huge amounts of money and of course, our entire audiences. Then museums are slower to come back, and they're particularly the ones that are dependent on foreign tourism, so they probably haven't still caught up to their best years.

The particularly hard-hit ones, Brian, were they're performing arts centers like Brooklyn Academy of Music, Public Theater, Lincoln Center. They're still not back to where they were, and they had horrific financial conditions. You may have seen in the last year that BAM and the Public Theater laid off between 15 and 20% of their staff. They've cut their programming in half. We're not anywhere near being out of the woods in terms of the entire sector, and that's why the support is-- to cut money from an institution that just laid off 50% of its staff is like drawing blood from a person who's losing blood.

Brian Lehrer: Talk about the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. What's going on there? We have this matching grant in our membership drive coincidentally today that's given by a couple in honor of Flaco. Did you ever have a Flaco sighting at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, or was Flaco more of a Manhattan bird?

Adrian: Flaco, as far as we can tell, was sticking to Manhattan, but we do have hundreds of different kinds of bird species that call Brooklyn Botanic Garden home. I like to joke that they've figured out there's an international buffet of fruits and berries. [laughter] It's not just the locals [crosstalk]. We have very, very happy, sassy birds, squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, and all kinds of wildlife. There's three hawks who call it home.

What's happening at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, it's a good best-of-times, worst-of-times story. We're having a great spring. We're having record attendance, but we're down 8% in our staffing because of the hiring freeze. We had a budget deficit this year for the first time in three years directly because of the city cuts. We had to delay a very important workforce development program that we were going to start to help train Brooklyn residents to become gardeners, which turns out is a very long, great lifetime profession that can have a union job and lifetime health benefits.

We've had to cut back on our memory loss programs. This kind of thing is playing out at all of the culturals where they've had to cut back hours, they closed for a time in the early winter months. They're laying staff off. It's very hard to recover from the pandemic when you're cutting back on services and cutting hours.

As we argue, this is a rounding error and a rounding error on something that drives ROI and drives the economy. Look, all of these economic factors are important. The most important thing, as Regina was saying, New York City is defined by its culture. People come to New York for its culture. Time Out Magazine said we're the greatest city in the world because of our arts and culture. Why would we cut the thing that is our calling card that makes people-- Fire, police, sanitation, the water department, they make life survivable here. Culture, libraries, and parks make life livable.

Brian Lehrer: Are you asking residents, New Yorkers to do anything to support your cause, Regina, if they agree with it, if they think more of the money in the budget? Again, it's a fixed number because they have to balance the budget every year but if they think a larger percentage should go to cultural institutions?

Regina:: Yes, we would love for all of our community to reach out to their city government, to reach out to their community boards, to reach out to their representatives and say, "Culture matters. My student has learned trumpet, my student has had a dance lesson, my child has grown through the arts and culture, and I want to make sure that it stays in my community."

We have a student who came to our museum in middle school for a concert, then came back to our museum as an intern, and now is a part-time worker there. Those are the types of stories that we want our representatives to hear about to know that culture matters to them, so please reach out and tell those stories.

Brian Lehrer: I'm so glad that you mentioned the students. I want to close with this, Regina, because when people think about the cultural institutions, maybe the first thing that comes to mind is performance, you go to a theater, you sit down, you watch a show. For these institutions at the community level, these over 1,000 institutions that you're talking about, it's really about participation and giving people, families of all income levels, the ability to participate in the arts, right?

Regina:: Yes, most definitely. Again, 82% of public schools work with our cultural institutions. When we don't have the funding to bring the artists to those schools, to bring the students to our institutions, that is cut. We're about to go into the summer season, and there are tons of free concerts that happen all around the city where those free concerts are supported through the cultural institutions that put them on. If they don't have the funding to do that, there will not be the free concerts for our community.

In addition to art and culture, and that word culture, is about more than art. It's about food, it's about gathering, so there are food pantries in many of our cultural institutions. There are voting drives that happen. It's about all of the things that make us who we are. That is culture. That is art and culture in New York. We need it to not only survive but thrive.

Brian Lehrer: Regina Bain, executive director of the Lewis Armstrong House Museum. Adrian Benepe, former New York City Parks Commissioner, now president of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Thank you both for joining us.

Adrian: Thank you, Brian.

Regina: Thank you.

 

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