There aren’t many art studio spaces left in downtown Boulder, but Marie-Juliette Bird owns one of them.
In just a few short years, her space, The New Local, 741 Pearl St., has hosted the creations of more than 80 local artists who work in a variety of media. The shop sells everything from paintings, ceramics and textile art to jewelry and botanical products. The nonprofit also hosts classes, workshops and community events.
But Bird said it’s been “completely overwhelming” to be one of the only places downtown where artists can share their work and connect with the community.
“We cannot keep up with the demand,” she said.
Bird, who grew up in Boulder, has watched as art studios and galleries have vanished from downtown Boulder, many of them driven out by the surging cost of commercial space. She said one longstanding art co-op on east Pearl Street closed down because it could no longer afford its rent, which she said had reached $50,000 per month.
Bird is one of numerous Boulder arts community members who say they’re worried about the future of public arts funding in the city. She said The New Local is having trouble keeping up with its overhead costs, and she described the money the city gives to help local arts nonprofits like hers as “crumbs.”
The concerns come amid predictions that Boulder is headed for tight financial times. Decisions about the 2025 budget haven’t been made yet, but next year’s budget has already become a controversial topic as a number of people in the community have begun to worry that money they thought would be dedicated to the arts may not be used for that purpose.
Some have even accused the city of cutting funding for the arts, and they are calling on Boulder to honor a ballot measure that voters approved last year that’s expected to boost arts funding.
City council members and city officials have roundly denied those accusations. They say arts funding is not being cut and is actually expected to double from this year to next year despite the fact that there are other city needs that currently have insufficient or no funding.
Even so, people in the arts community have expressed feeling squeezed by financial constraints and the growing difficulty of making ends meet in Boulder, where the cost of living continues to spike. They say the arts bring immense value to the community and that the city’s not adequately prioritizing arts funding.
Ballot Issue 2A: A ‘compromise’ measure to fund city needs and the arts
A lot of the current controversy around arts funding in next year’s budget can be traced back to the passage of Ballot Issue 2A last fall.
Ballot Issue 2A was born from several months of discussion and negotiation. It started out as a citizen-initiated petition circulated by arts advocacy group Create Boulder. Boulder has had a 0.15% sales and use tax since 2004 that’s set to expire at the end of this year. The original citizen initiative would have asked voters to extend the sales and use tax for another 20 years and dedicate all of the revenue to the arts.
The tax, which currently generates an estimated $7.25 million per year in revenue, has been a major source of money for the city’s general fund. City staffers said last year that if the tax were not renewed, or if it were dedicated for another purpose, the city would face a budget gap and potentially need to cut programs or services. Boulder then created a competing ballot measure that would have extended the tax and kept the revenue in the city’s general fund.
At a study session on July 13, Councilmember Matthew Benjamin said he and other council members had had individual conversations with members of the Create Boulder group, and through those conversations, they arrived at a new idea: a compromise measure that would extend the tax and split the revenue evenly between the general fund and the arts.
In August, most council members supported that compromise measure over either the original citizen initiative or the conflicting city alternative. Create Boulder had already gathered more than enough signatures to get their original proposal, of dedicating 100% of the revenue to the arts, onto the ballot, but the group agreed to withdraw the petition “in a spirit of compromise,” said Nick Forster, a member of Create Boulder and the CEO of eTown Hall.
The compromise measure, later dubbed Ballot Issue 2A, was approved by 75% of Boulder voters and will go into effect in 2025. And although sales and use tax revenue has been flattening out, assuming the tax revenue stays roughly the same as it has been, in 2025 it should bring in about $3.6 million for the general fund and another $3.6 million that will go into a dedicated arts, culture and heritage fund.
However, the city has also been giving $1.8 million a year from the general fund to the Boulder Office of Arts and Culture. Forster said he met with city staff earlier this year and was told that, in 2025, that $1.8 million allocation may be going away. If that happens, some of the $3.6 million in the arts fund could go toward funding the Office of Arts and Culture
Bird said she believed that all of the $3.6 million was meant to go directly to arts nonprofits instead of being used for city purposes. The ballot measure language says the tax revenue will be used to fund services and projects “including” direct and grant funding for arts and culture nonprofits, professional artists and arts education, but it does not specify that all of the revenue must go toward those purposes.
Meanwhile, Forster said he now feels it was a “mistake” to compromise with the city and that he thinks Create Boulder’s original ballot measure would have passed. He said the people who supported the original measure wanted to see that $7.25 million in yearly tax revenue dedicated to arts and culture.
“Not only did they see us compromise with the city and cut that number in half, but now we’re seeing the city’s demands on those dollars cut it almost in half again,” he told the Daily Camera.
Forster clarified that he does not think the city has done anything “illegal or untoward,” but he implied he does not believe the city has honored its promises to the electorate. He questioned why the city does not dedicate more funding to the arts, especially when it no longer spends upwards of $10 million per year on a municipal library district (the local library system is now its own tax-funded district separate from the city).
“There’s no question as to whether the city could do better, and there’s no question as to whether or not the voters want the city to do better,” he said. “And so the question is simply, is there political will to respect the will of the voters?”
Sorting through the confusion
Several council members told the Daily Camera the city has not violated any of its promises or commitments, but there may be some confusion around what Ballot Issue 2A requires and what the city actually committed to do.
Arts advocates expressed hope that the city would continue to allocate $1.8 million per year from the general fund in addition to the $3.6 million yearly in dedicated arts funding from the sales and use tax, but according to the council members, the city never agreed to do that.
“They had hoped we could commit that $1.8 million. We said, ‘we can’t bind future councils to do that,'” said Mayor Aaron Brockett, who was part of the negotiations for the compromise ballot measure. “We can’t guarantee that level of general funding.”
At a meeting late last summer, then-budget officer Mark Woulf also told council members he expected the $3.6 million from the sales and use tax would likely replace the $1.8 million dedication from the general fund.
The council is just starting the process of determining how city dollars should be spent in 2025, but Councilmember Mark Wallach said the arts should see a significant increase in funding next year, regardless.
“(The arts) budget is, in effect, doubled, and (community members) are unhappy because it’s not being tripled,” he said. “They’re being treated better than any other department in the city. Nobody is getting their budget doubled. Some people are getting their budgets cut. Some programs may end up getting zeroed out.”
What’s more, the idea that the city has millions of extra dollars per year to burn because it’s no longer funding the library district is a myth, according to Mayor Pro Tem Nicole Speer. City budget line items don’t roll over from year to year because the city makes holistic decisions, based on the amount of available funding, on how to spend general fund dollars.
Speer said the city has needed to hire more staff to help offset some of the costs of the pandemic and that a “coming together of many different forces” has put strain on the city budget.
“Especially as we head into a very constrained budgeting environment, we are going to be looking really hard at the general fund and trying to figure out how to sustain as many necessary programs as possible,” she said.
Additionally, city staff have said that 68% of Boulder’s budget is tied up in dedicated funds. While Boulder can reallocate general funds for other purposes as needed, the city cannot do so with dedicated funds.
More ‘philanthropic spirit’ could help support arts community in Boulder
The city does not appear to be going against what voters approved when they said yes to Ballot Issue 2A. Nonetheless, the arts community is struggling to thrive in Boulder, said Bird of The New Local. She and others have expressed disappointment that the arts don’t make up a larger percentage of the city budget.
Bird said she would like to see Boulder dedicate 1% of its funding to the arts and that she believes voters sent a clear message that they want to see more arts and culture here.
“People who live here, they want to have arts and culture because it increases everyone’s quality of life,” she said. “And (Boulder) has one of the highest per-capita (rates) of creative people in the country. So there’s what the people who live here want and vote for, and then there’s what’s actually happening with the city budgeting.”
Boulder’s City Council could decide to dedicate more funding for arts and culture purposes. Brockett has said he will advocate for this and that he’s optimistic at least some money can be set aside.
But for the moment, the struggle of having limited budget dollars to fund a myriad of city needs is being felt across the community. Speer said she hopes to see an increase in “philanthropic spirit” and community support in Boulder for the arts.
“As a community, how do we start investing in each other’s well-being? … It is a time where so many in our community are struggling, whether they’re artists, or low-income families or hourly workers or people with disabilities,” she said. “How do we all come together and help each other?”
