The musicians begin signing in at the stage door as early as one hour before the final pops rehearsal of the 2007 Florida Orchestra season. Some are toting light violin cases, others heavy double basses; all are carrying a great deal of uncertainty about the future.
Nobody gets rich playing in this orchestra, and most hold at least one other job — teaching in school or tutoring at home — to make ends meet. Like so many other creatives in the Tampa Bay region, they do it for the love of their art.
On this Friday afternoon, only a few hours before their evening performance in the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, they are working with Marvin Hamlisch, the Tony-, Grammy- and Oscar-winning composer of such hits as A Chorus Line and "The Way We Were." Hamlisch shows up 20 minutes before rehearsal starts, dressed unassumingly in khakis, a pink shirt and a blue sports coat. He heads center stage to the piano and talks on his cell phone while orchestra members find their seats and begin the cacophony of tuning and warming up.
He leads them through a program of instantly recognizable movie and Broadway hits, at times stopping abruptly to fine-tune the score or, in one case, to question whether a certain violinist is playing two A sharps or not. When told yes, he responds, "I don't hear that."
In the woodwinds section, however, assistant principal Erika Shrauger is worried about more than just pleasing Hamlisch.
Hanging over the heads of every musician in the hall is Florida's property tax revolt. She and her colleagues have been caught in the crossfire between state legislators bent on tax relief and local governments facing the loss of tens of millions of dollars annually. Municipalities throughout Florida are already bracing for the financial hit and warning arts organizations of the worst-case scenario: No local money for the arts.
"If these cuts come into being, [it is] the actual existence of a full-time professional orchestra that may be in question," Shrauger said. "I'm very concerned."
This year's property tax drama is the worst threat to arts and cultural funding in recent memory. Consider the examples in Tampa Bay: St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Baker has threatened to cut all city arts grants in his search to find as much as $23 million he could lose in property tax reform. Mayor Pam Iorio last month sent a letter to local arts groups giving them the same message: Their grants are not safe, not by a long shot.
Then consider this from Tallahassee: The legislature received proposals for $21 million in cultural facility grants — and didn't provide a single dime.
Those facilities affected locally include the planned Children's Museum in downtown Tampa, the Florida Folk Culture and Visitors Center in Largo and an expansion of the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg that would allow it to exhibit more of the paintings it owns (90 percent of its collection sits in storage for lack of display space).
Arts and cultural institutions pump $2.9 billion into the Florida economy, account for more than 28,000 jobs and enrich the character of our cities and towns. So why are they always the unloved stepchild of government funding? Why has arts funding per capita, according to a Florida Atlantic University economist, decreased by 40 percent over the past decade? Why does Florida talk about bolstering its creative class and yet do little to invest in making that happen?
It's a weekday morning at Creative Clay's colorful studio on Central Avenue in St. Petersburg, and 10 member artists sit in deep concentration at a long table, doodling with large black markers on white sheets of paper that may become T-shirt designs for the Devil Rays baseball team. When asked to show their designs, the men and women smile and proudly present their work. Stephanie Hedeen holds up her design featuring a smiling devil and the beginnings of a house.
"I like painting," she says, putting the paper down and continuing to draw.
On the other side of the table, Chris Coyle opens two sketchbooks filled with hundreds of drawings completed since coming to Creative Clay 11 years ago.
"Drawing makes me happy," he says, opening to a red and orange picture of a Florida State University football player. The sketch is an early version of a large canvas painting that hangs in the front studio.
Between 8:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. every day, Creative Clay offers Hedeen, Coyle and 45 other men and women diagnosed with developmental disabilities or health challenges a safe place to develop their creative talents. When not painting or sculpting in the studio, specially trained workers take the budding artists to various cultural institutions in the community. Today, this group will split up and visit the YMCA, work on a dance routine for an upcoming show and hang some of their paintings at the downtown Bank of America.
But if the expected budget cuts hit Creative Clay, the 47 member artists who rely on the nonprofit may not have anywhere to go. Between city grants and the end of a line item in the state budget, Creative Clay stands to lose up to $200,000 — 40 percent of its overall budget.
"After 13 years of doing business," says co-founder and executive director Grace Anne Alfiero, "we'll close."
Creative Clay isn't the only organization predicting a bleak outlook in St. Petersburg and Pinellas County.
And Anne Wykell, St. Petersburg's cultural affairs manager, who has not seen a cut to arts funding in her seven years in the job: "I think everything is on the table in a time like this."
Last year, St. Pete awarded more than $400,000 in arts grants to area nonprofits; Pinellas County gave nearly $700,000 in cultural development grants.
While some of St. Pete's major cultural institutions can likely weather the budget storm, perhaps cutting some educational and outreach programs, the effect on smaller organizations will be devastating. Although Tampa's mayor says she is trying to temper her cuts, St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Baker has taken a harder stance.
"This is not just a threat to the arts," Baker said during Reality Check Tampa Bay, a recent urban planning session that looked ahead to the region's next 50 years. "They're talking 30 to 40 percent cuts in all city services. You have to pay for the basic services to the extent you can." He didn't rule out cuts to police and fire services.
That leaves no wiggle room to find money for the arts.
If the Life Force Cultural Academy, a decade-old nonprofit that uses performing arts to uplift at-risk youth through summer camps and after school programs, loses funding, director Jai Hinson warned that hundreds of children could be left without a positive place to go during the summer.
"It would take us back 16 years," she said. "We'd basically be starting from scratch."
David Manson from EMIT, which receives a third of its $29,000 budget from city and county grants, said area residents will miss out on avant-garde music they can't find anywhere else in Tampa Bay.
"It would directly affect the programming I have," he said. "I really wouldn't be able to bring in any free jazz or any experimental music."
St. Petersburg Little Theatre stands to lose $38,000 of their $214,000 budget, something Deborah Kelley said could reduce the stipends for directors, choreographers and set builders, who also act as mentors for the theater's volunteers. And that's not even counting the impact on St. Pete's reputation as a cultural hub.
"It seems to me the revitalization of downtown is arts-driven," she said. "Everyone is going to suffer."
Even organizations like the St. Petersburg International Folk Fair Society (SPIFFS), which receives only 10 percent of its budget through the county and city, warn that a small cut can have a downward spiral effect, causing festivals to downsize, which will in turn, bring in less money to offset costs.
"Even without the city budget cuts we were facing a dire situation," said Bill Parsons of SPIFFS. "We can do [the folk festival] one more year, but after that we will be in trouble for the future."
Even those who can take the hit say they'll still suffer to one degree or another.
"For a major corporation, $20,000 is nothing," said Andy Orrell, director of marketing for the theater company American Stage, which has a $1.3 million budget. "For a cultural arts organization, $20,000 is the difference between keeping the electric on or not."
Many arts groups are reticent to talk publicly about their dilemma, afraid either to expose financial weaknesses inherent in running many cultural businesses or worried they might upset government officials who are voting on their subsidies later this summer.
That reticence is coupled with enough uncertainty about the impact of the competing tax reform proposals to keep this arts crisis almost an underground phenomenon.
Hillsborough County Arts Council president Art Keeble flat-out said he doesn't believe the Legislature will reach an agreement on tax cuts during its June 12-22 special session and that the issue will prove moot for this year. At the same time, last week he sent a letter to arts organizations telling them to be prepared for a 25 percent cut in funding from the county.
The future of Tampa Bay's arts, then, could rest largely on the shoulders of a joint Senate and House committee that is already working on crafting a compromise tax reform package. Only three Tampa Bay legislators are on that committee: Pasco state Rep. Will Weatherford, Sen. Ronda Storms and Rep. Michael Scionti of West Tampa.
If the rhetoric coming from House and Senate leaders is any indication, local governments should brace for the worst.
"Taxpayers have been overcharged for far too long, and it is time for them to get a refund," Senate Finance and Tax Chairman Mike Haridopolos, a Republican, said in a written statement when the special session was announced. "Government needs to go on a diet. Our comprehensive plan will require cuts to wasteful spending and will result in lower property taxes, both now and in the future."
Local leaders are fighting back, hard enough that some critics are accusing them of crying wolf with their proposed budget cuts. But it seems unlikely that cities can, or will, cut salaries, administrative costs and waste enough to come up with the tens of millions they stand to lose in property taxes.
As Mayor Baker said, "At the end of the day, I can't print money."
"The musicians are working people like everybody else," said Shrauger of the Florida Orchestra. "Obviously we recognize that high property taxes are a hardship on everybody's budget."
At the same time, their value in a community hardly seems fully appreciated. In the same stretch as their Hamlisch pops concert, which drew mostly older fans, it was preparing a masterworks show that featured Anne Akiko Meyers, an internationally known star violinist, playing Vaughn Williams' "The Lark Ascending." After that, the orchestra was set to back Latino star Jon Secada in a Ford Amphitheatre concert.
"These are musicians who live here and hone their craft here and teach here, and their influence is felt in all parts of our community," said Shrauger, who is a member of the orchestra's musicians committee. "The culture they bring is woven into the fabric of the community."
The orchestra faces the most peril of all the local arts groups, by many accounts. For years, it has squeaked by financially and yet still puts an accomplished regional orchestra onstage and in free outdoor concerts in Tampa and Clearwater.
But it depends on $850,000 in local arts grants to do all that. St. Petersburg could cut its contribution — $130,000 in rent subsidies at the Mahaffey — and Tampa is reconsidering the $400,000 it gives for free concerts.
Marvin Hamlisch is likely blissfully unaware of Florida's property tax dilemma, but he is very aware of the state of arts funding overall. After guest singer Mark McVey finishes a run-through of "Soliloquy," Hamlisch hears a few tentative claps from the high-end donors attending the rehearsal; they seem unsure of whether they can let the performers know how they feel after each song. Hamlisch turns around and says, "Were those folks told not to applaud? When you donate, we applaud."
And more and more, arts groups must try to increase their private donations as the bedrock support from government slips away.
"That's a daunting task because we're going to be facing the same donors that are going to be highly solicited by other organizations," said SPIFF's Parsons.
"Undoubtedly, the arts are not priority," said Rene Gonzalez, the founder and artistic director of Tampa's Spanish Lyric Theater, the oldest Hispanic theater company in the nation in its 49th season. "Even keeping the stadium open is more important than that."
Gonzalez's bilingual company will do its last show of the season just one day after the Hamlisch rehearsal, in the same arts center. "Agua, Azucarillos y Aguardiente" is a late 19th-century operetta that, without the Spanish Lyric Theater, would never see the light of day in Tampa Bay.
Gonzalez could lose $10,000 in Tampa grants and another $28,000 in county dollars, or about one-sixth of his total budget.
"It would be a hardship, there's no doubt about it," he said. "At this point, we're in the black, thanks, in part, of our government support. It would be a big problem for us. I wish there's other things that could be done."
The thought of losing cultural groups and arts organizations that, in many cases, define Tampa Bay troubles even those who will wield the ax.
"It's going to be terrible," said Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio. "I just want to go on record as we announce these cuts [that] I'm not in favor of any of them. We're going to have to cut across the board, and that includes arts funding."
Iorio also has to deal with the fact that Tampa owns many of the cultural facilities that would be the subject of the operating cuts, including the Performing Arts Center, Tampa Museum, Tampa Theatre, Lowry Park Zoo and Florida Aquarium. Her St. Pete counterpart, in contrast, has ownership of only the Mahaffey Theater and The Pier.
Iorio said she hopes to be able to give arts groups at least 50 percent of what they have been getting from the city. Some groups that are in better financial shape, such as the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, with its lucrative Broadway series and well-funded endowment, could lose more as Iorio weighs who can survive the cuts and who can't. Others that are more needy, such as the Tampa Museum of Art, which is just undertaking a new building construction program, could lose only $100,000 from its $1 million city subsidy, she said.
Other groups' fates are less certain.
The Tampa Black Heritage Festival stands to lose $40,000 in city and county dollars. "It would be devastating to the festival," said board member Ken Anthony. He did not rule out having to shut it down.
And the list goes on, with some institutions taking a double hit, in operating dollars and construction money. The Tampa Bay History Center could lose a $125,000 subsidy and has already lost $500,000 in state funds this year to finish the interior of new exhibition space. Lowry Park Zoo depends on $350,000 from the city to operate and lost $500,000 for an entrance renovation project that was a state priority. The Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center won't get a $500,000 grant for backstage renovations and needed technology upgrades that were on a state priority list; that's in addition to losing some of the $790,000 city operating grant that Iorio has targeted.
Any cuts at the Performing Arts Center, or any arts halls in the area, could have a nasty multiplier effect if those institutions have to pass along the deficit in the form of higher rents and fees for arts groups that perform and rehearse there.
And that brings us back to the Florida Orchestra, which — without a permanent residence of its own — must book audition, rehearsal and performance time at three different Tampa Bay halls.
The strain of the funding crisis invariably impacts the musicians' ability to stay focused on the job at hand: the notes on the score.
"It's very distracting for the creative process among artists," Shrauger said. "One of the things we do need is a base of security in order to be creative."
The orchestra's executive director, Leonard David Stone, said there is too much uncertainty to predict how bad his organization will be hit. There will be budget cutbacks, Stone insisted, but beyond that he isn't able to say.
"It's a big question," he conceded, "for which we don't have the answer yet."
Chris Fontaine is one of the few students at Creative Clay who has heard of the tax cut threat. He plans to speak at the upcoming city budget hearings.
"This place offers people [the chance] to learn how to cope with everyday life, like going out into the public," he says, adding if he weren't at Creative Clay he'd "probably be at home watching TV."
Grace Ann Alfiero paints a bleaker picture.
"We're providing an opportunity for an improved quality of life," she says. "If we aren't here, people might be staying at home or wandering the streets."
Worst-case scenario: Creative Clay closes Aug. 30.
"It's going to create a situation where one of the most vulnerable populations of our society is not going to get the services they need," Alfiero says. She's accepted the loss of state funds this year; she's hoping Mayor Baker will have a change of heart.
Fontaine adds: "Please don't close down our place."
This article appears in May 30 – Jun 5, 2007.
