It’s taken 25 years, but Palm Coast seems ready to take the arts seriously. The City Council today approved a plan that would require developers to pay a small portion of their development costs into an arts fund to pay for public art installations. If such a fund had been established last year, it would have raised nearly $1 million, city officials said.
Until now, the city’s entire investment in the arts has consisted of an annual set of about a dozen arts grants to local organizations, a notoriously stingy allocation that has been between $20,000 and $30,000 a year in most years. The city established a downtown arts district several years ago but never made any financial commitments, and the organization that was supposed to oversee it – United We Art – fell apart a few months ago, losing many of its board members.
Today, at the direction of the City Council, Parks and Recreation Director James Hirst presented a plan with options for the city to use new revenue to build a public arts program. One approach would have involved using taxpayer money in a variety of ways. The other would be to do what numerous cities and counties from New York City to Sarasota are doing: requiring developers and builders to dedicate a portion of their project costs to a city-managed arts fund.
Council members Nick Klufas and Theresa Pontieri have embraced this approach and quickly gained the approval of Mayor David Alfin and Council member Cathy Heighter. Council member Ed Danko, as usual, had other things to do than fulfill his public duties: He was campaigning. (Alfin and Klufas are also campaigning, but not at the expense of their meeting obligations. See: “2 council colleagues sharply criticize Ed Danko for leaving meeting to campaign after city manager’s firing.”)
“If we can use the revenue from the development, which is over a million dollars, to support a cultural program, those options seem to become much more acceptable,” said Council Member Nick Klufas. “I would like to see a portion of the development, which is over a million dollars, go toward supporting the arts.”
Some local governments, Hirst said, use a percentage of their annual capital expenditures – between 0.5 and 2 percent – to commission public artworks to be installed in or next to the newly constructed building. Orlando is paying 1 percent of those capital expenditures for art installations.
In Sarasota, on the other hand, property owners and developers applying for a building permit must contribute 0.5 percent of the project cost to a public art fund or, alternatively, provide public art on the building site or in a public place. The ordinance applies to apartments, mixed-use developments and commercial buildings. The city has so much public art, including murals and sculptures, and more than 20 private art galleries that it has its own pair of trolleys that travel through the arts district and host “mural artists’ gatherings” (and hold art contests to select which works will be installed on roundabouts).
“If we went down that path, and made just half a percent of the investment in commercial real estate over the last 12 months, we could expect $978,000 to be donated to an arts fund in our city alone,” Hirst said.
Council member Theresa Pontieri supports the idea. “The city of Sarasota has a really good structure here where it’s a small percentage, but when we look at these big developments, it ends up being quite a chunk of money,” she said. She’s looking for a more detailed proposal along those lines. Pontieri pointed to the nine-page spreadsheet Hurt and his staff presented to the council that illustrated the diversity of municipal arts programs across the state — and how much Palm Coast lagged in that regard. There are “a lot of cities in Florida that have done similar things, and we’re really behind here,” she said. “So I think it’s good that we’re doing it. I think we should move forward expeditiously.”
Pontieri and Klufas recommended some caveats. For example, low-cost housing complexes could be exempted from the participation requirement. Developers should also ensure that they do not spend all the money required on the building sites by finding ways to avoid their obligation. Or they should limit art to private building sites, Pontieri said.
The city needs to have flexibility in managing the funds “so that we can distribute them as we see fit,” Klufas said, “and just because they own a work of art that’s valued at half a million dollars doesn’t necessarily mean they’re released from that obligation.”
Other cities take different approaches. In Houston, for example, “the Cultural Arts Council of Houston receives a percentage of the hotel/motel tax for art,” Hurst’s presentation states. (No organization by that name could be found online, and a directory pointing to the website of such an organization resulted in a dead link.)
Phoenix funds the arts through general revenue, state lottery money and grants, the presentation said. Phoenix’s current Arts and Culture Department is budgeting $10 million for next year in a $4.7 billion budget that does not include $81 million for the city’s convention center. The city budget does not list lottery revenue, and the 2023 mandated appropriation that receives Arizona lottery money does not include the arts. San Diego funds culture through its tourist bed tax.
A referendum is another approach, as in Volusia County, where voters have agreed since 2000 to allocate a portion of the county budget to the arts. Revenue comes from a special property tax of 0.2 per thousand per year, or $30 for a $200,000 home with a property tax exemption.
The so-called ECHO Fund (the acronym stands for Environmental, Cultural, Historical and Outdoors) has generated over $100 million since 2000. Organizations can receive grants ranging from $12,500 to $600,000, with grants subject to conditions. Voters again voted in 2020 by a 72 percent majority to extend the program for another 20 years. (The list of all ECHO grants over the years can be found here.)
What Palm Coast city councilors liked most was the avoidance of any discussion of taxes or public funds.
“I’m all for the developers’ input because I think we can all directly connect that to the same comments we make about the school district, for example,” Alfin said. “The more we invest in arts, culture and history, the more valuable our city will be, not only for residents but for the future. There’s no doubt about that. So I would definitely be for the development community’s investment.”
To bolster its arts fund, the city expects to see significant savings in operating costs by using solar energy, as is already the case at the Southern Recreation Center. The city will also receive money back – 30 percent of its investment – which would result in savings of about $11,000 that could benefit an arts fund. But that wouldn’t happen until 2028.
The council wanted to know what it would cost to spin off arts and culture into its own department, separate from parks and recreation. One option would cost $540,000, with more than half of that going to salaries. If operations remained in the parks and recreation department, but as a subdivision of that department, the cost would drop to $450,000. Pontieri was not in favor of such a spinoff, at least not at the moment.
But it’s not entirely clear who in the city would manage the art fund — who would judge, select and place art and culture projects. The city has a beautification committee, which has so far been responsible for reviewing the few art installations the city has benefited from at Town Center, as well as reviewing the monuments in Heroes Park. But its role would change and expand if it were to oversee the aesthetic part — the most important part — of the city’s new art initiative: Anyone can add and subtract dollar amounts or check the proper proportions of a monument. Few can tell art from trash.
Since the city is currently “stingy with money, especially for public safety, which I think has to take priority over arts and culture,” Pontieri said, the structure should remain under the jurisdiction of the Parks and Recreation Fund “until we can look at the budget and say, ‘Okay, now we have enough money together to divide it up or recategorize it.'”
Further details of the public art ordinance that the council had Hirst write will presumably spell out some of the responsibilities. But details aside, Tuesday’s council decision was a significant, if unexpected, step in the city’s push to become a public place for art. But the ordinance still needs to be drafted, builders and developers, including the powerful Flagler Home Builders Association, need to be consulted, and next week’s election needs to be survived (by Alfin, anyway) before the council has anything tangible to vote on.
Palm Coast Cultural Promotion
