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WAC reeling from gaming grant cuts

Children’s Art Fest, other programs likely to be scaled back: director

No events will be cancelled but some — such as the popular Whistler Children’s Art Festival — will have to be “scaled back significantly” as a result of last week’s B.C. government decision to eliminate B.C. Gaming Grants funding to arts and cultural groups, the head of the Whistler Arts Council (WAC) said last week.

“One way to go would be to cancel something, but what do you cancel?” Doti Niedermayer, WAC executive director, said on Thursday (March 11). “These are programs that are embedded in the community.”

Last September, when the Province announced as part of its budget update that WAC and other B.C. arts group would not receive gaming grant funding, it seemed to Niedermayer like a one-off — an emergency move taken with considerable angst in tough economic times. But last Monday’s (March 8) announcement that arts, culture and sports groups primarily targeting adult events and programs would receive no gaming grant money seemed like a policy that will be in place for at least a few years, Niedermayer said.

Until last September, WAC officials were receiving about $40,000 a year through the Gaming Grants program, and another $21,000 from the B.C. Council for the Arts. This year WAC will receive $7,000 from the latter and none from the former. The impact on events and programs will most certainly be felt, she said.

In 2009, WAC programs were backstopped by some of the approximately $500,000 Whistler received as one of the designated Cultural Capitals of Canada, a federal government program. But that money isn’t be available to support artistic and cultural programs this year, either.

Niedermayer said that after last year’s gaming grants rejection, she expected some funding to be restored for 2010.

“I thought last year was a tough year and whatever happened, happened. Now, this sort of continuation of that is a real big concern,” she said. “We’ve worked something like six years to build our cultural and arts presence and now I’m standing here saying, ‘Well, what was the point of that?’ We’re just taking an enormous step back.

“I understand budgets… I don’t think the world owes us a living. But it’s such a huge step back that I don’t understand the thinking. It’s just a complete reversal… We’ve been building this for the last eight to 10 years, so it’ll be tough.”

She said the three programs likely to be most severely affected are the Children’s Art Festival, the Art Workshops on the Lake and ArtWalk. Ticket prices will to the Children’s Art Festival will likely have to increase, but she said she hopes WAC will be able to hold the line on prices for tickets to events staged as part of WAC’s Performance Series.

“Our need to fundraise from individuals will increase markedly — we had already focused more on that last year. And we’ll look at raising ticket prices,” she said.

WAC officials might also have to consider staffing cuts, Niedermayer said. The group, which operates on a budget of around $1 million a year, currently has three full-time and two contract employees.

John Hetherington, chair of the Whistler Museum and Archives Society, is taking more of a wait-and-see approach. That’s because B.C. Housing and Social Development Minister Rich Coleman left the door open to groups that run museums and host fairs and festivals. The gaming grant money allotted to those groups, though, has been cut in half, to $4 million a year.

Before last September, the Whistler Museum was receiving about $40,000 annually from gaming grants.

“The museum is still going ahead with an application for a gaming grant because it may qualify under some sort of program, but we’re not holding our breaths on it,” Hetherington said. “Let’s put it this way: We haven’t put it into our budget yet.

“If it comes through it’ll be a nice bonus, but if it doesn’t come through, we’ll somehow survive.”

Niedermayer said one residual impact of losing funding from government sources is that arts groups such as WAC often use those grants as a sort of stamp of approval when applying for grants from other sources.

“It shows that you’ve been vetted by someone else. It gives organizations a legitimacy and a status. That makes a huge difference when you’re (private sources) considering who you’re giving money to,” she said.

It’s difficult to predict how the loss of the government grants will affect WAC’s ability to attract funding from private foundations and the like, Niedermayer said.

The fact that WAC is in the process of amalgamating with the Millennium Place Society should offer at least a small measure of relief from the budget cutbacks, she said. The amalgamation is scheduled to be complete in May or June.

“That’s actually a fairly timely move for us,” she said. “There are some savings in non-programming areas that will actually assist with our programming.”

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