Layoffs, grant funding cuts take effect at New Hampshire’s Council on the Arts

Six of the seven employees at New Hampshire’s State Council on the Arts, who administered and coordinated state-funded grants to local arts organizations, were laid off on Thursday as a result of state budget cuts. The council and its volunteer members still exist — a reversal from Republican lawmakers’ initial proposal to nix the group entirely — but the executive director, Adele Sicilia, is now the only employee left on payroll.

Mary McLaughlin, who chairs the Council on the Arts, said the whole process has been “not fun.”

“It’s very difficult to say goodbye to six incredibly talented, smart people who have lost their jobs for nothing that they did wrong,” she said.

Republican lawmakers, when cutting funding for those positions and grants, said the arts qualified more as a want than a need in a tight budget year.

“This just didn’t reach the level of necessary funding,” Rep. Dan McGuire, an Epsom Republican who played a leading role in crafting the state budget, said at a committee meeting in March. “It’s a want-to-have, a nice-to-have kind of thing but not a must-have, in my opinion.”

Sal Prizio, executive director at the Capital Center for the Arts in Concord, said that line of thinking is out of date. He argued that the arts provide a valuable economic stimulus to local communities and should be treated as such.

“It’s not a gift,” Prizio said. “It’s an investment that you get a return on.”

In an effort to avoid shutting down the council altogether, Sanbornton Republican Sen. Tim Lang engineered a new fundraising mechanism.

The state now allocates $150,000 from its general fund each year to cover Sicilia’s salary and miscellaneous expenses. The rest — up to $700,000 — will be raised through the sale of business tax credits. The state-run Granite Patron of the Arts Fund will allow qualifying businesses to purchase donations to the council and, in turn, receive a tax credit for half the amount they bought.

The Council can sell up to $350,000 in those tax credits, Lang said, but outside of that, it can raise as much money through donations and benefactors as it wants.

Lang said he doesn’t disagree with advocates that the Council on the Arts is important. But if tasked with a choice between funding developmental disability services or the arts, he said, he has to choose disability services — so he found what he said is a creative solution that doesn’t rely on state money but still lets people invest in the arts.

“Culture’s important for the state,” Lang said in an interview. “The question was: we’re in a tight budget year and where to find funds.”

That money isn’t secured or guaranteed yet, however, so arts organizations across the state are scrambling for other funding sources to supplement their operating budgets and programming. Some, like the Alliance for the Visual Arts (AVA) Gallery and Art Center in Lebanon, plan to reach out to loyal and new donors. Others will search for alternative grant programs from private charities.

Leaders of several organizations anticipate that changes at the council will lead to a more competitive market when applying for grants elsewhere. And, unlike the council, most charities aren’t dedicated to supporting the arts exclusively.

“They’re looking at places that do immediate work, like a food pantry or a homeless shelter, and so they think of the arts as not as important,” said Genevieve Aichele, the Theatre Project’s community engagement director. “People don’t think of the arts as something that connects communities … so it’s just going to be more difficult.”