DeSantis Vetoes All Arts Grants in Florida

For the past 10 days, Richard Russell has been rattled, poring over budgets and working the phones in an attempt to limit the consequences of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s veto pen.

Mr. Russell, the general director of the Sarasota Opera on Florida’s Gulf Coast, had expected his nonprofit organization to receive a state grant of about $70,000 once Mr. DeSantis signed a budget that state lawmakers had approved in March.

But in a move that stunned arts and culture organizations, Mr. DeSantis vetoed the entirety of their grant funding — about $32 million — on June 12, leaving them scrambling to figure out how to offset the shortfall.

“It’s not going to close us,” Mr. Russell said. “But it is a gap that I am going to have to figure out how to make up, and if I don’t find alternate sources of funding, that could be someone’s job.”

Leaders of arts organizations in Florida, many of whom have worked in the state for decades, cannot remember a governor ever eliminating all of their grant funding. Even in the lean years of the Great Recession, at least a nominal amount — say, 5 percent of the recommended total — was approved.

Established arts organizations usually know better than to overly rely on nonrecurring state dollars subject to the discretion of politicians, said Michael Tomor, executive director of the Tampa Museum of Art. But to cut funding at a time when arts organizations are still struggling to recover from the coronavirus pandemic sends a concerning message “that taxpayer dollars should not be used in support of arts and culture,” he added.

In reality, Dr. Tomor said, organizations like his are tourism and economic drivers that also provide a public good, especially for children, older people and underserved communities.

“We truly are learning institutions,” said Dr. Tomor, whose museum expected to receive a $500,000 capital grant and a $70,500 operational grant this year. “We fulfill an important role in our communities.”

Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, gave no explanation for zeroing out the arts grants. His office said in a statement that he made veto decisions “that are in the best interests of the State of Florida.”

In all, Mr. DeSantis vetoed nearly $950 million in proposed spending and proclaimed that the remaining $116.5 billion came in under the previous year’s budget.

“This is a budget that shows it can be done,” Mr. DeSantis said at a news conference.

Following the governor’s veto, the Florida Cultural Alliance, an advocacy organization for arts and culture groups, learned from its lobbyist that the administration might seek to revamp the process for awarding the grants, said Jennifer Jones, the alliance’s president and chief executive.

The current process requires organizations to submit annual applications for vetting to the state Division of Arts & Culture. For this year, the division recommended about $77 million in grants; after appropriations committee hearings, lawmakers included $32 million — $26 million in operational grants and $6 million in capital grants — in their budget.

“What’s interesting is that, just a couple of years ago, we had the highest ever funding for the arts in the state,” Ms. Jones said.

In retrospect, she and other arts leaders said, it seemed telling that Mr. DeSantis had not set aside a place-holder amount of funding for arts grants, as he had done in previous years, in his initial budget proposal in December.

But since lawmakers did include the money in the budget they approved in March, arts organizations thought that funds would ultimately come their way. It took Mr. DeSantis several months to formally receive, review and sign the budget, for the fiscal year that begins on July 1.

Funding for some cultural organizations did survive, as projects put forth by individual lawmakers. In the past, leaders of arts organizations have been discouraged from seeking those earmarks and encouraged to apply through the grant program instead, Mr. Russell, of the Sarasota Opera, said.

Many people have moved to Florida in recent years, and cities like Sarasota and St. Petersburg, also on the Gulf Coast, have promoted the arts as part of their identity, becoming destinations for those looking for a lively cultural scene.

Even small towns have benefited from having arts groups anchoring cultural programming, said Grace B. Robinson, executive director of the Gadsden Arts Center & Museum in Quincy, a city of about 8,000 in the rural Florida Panhandle.

“We attract people who improve residential and business properties — many of whom will only move to communities with quality art organizations,” she said. The center had expected to receive a $50,000 grant, which would have amounted to about 12 percent of its annual budget, she added.

After Mr. DeSantis’s veto, the Florida Cultural Alliance asked its members how the funding cuts would affect them. Out of 108 organizations that responded to the survey, 73 percent said they would make adjustments and continue with their existing plans.

But 41 percent said they would have to cancel public events, 35 percent said they would have to cut programming for children and 31 percent said they would have to reduce their staff.