Tallahassee is an arts-filled community. Many of these nonprofits receive grant funding through the Council on Culture & Arts (COCA).
Now, a lot of folks are concerned about a proposal that would impact COCA’s ability to dole out allotted tourist development tax (TDT) dollars for arts and culture programs.
Visit Tallahassee may soon be taking over administration of that grant process, which has grown to $2 million annually. That’s the topic of today’s Speaking Of.
The Leon County Commission will hold a workshop next month after hearing from dozens of COCA supporters who want the process to stay just as it is.
One of those public speakers was local musician Melinda Lanigan. She told commissioners she grew up in Levy County, which she calls an arts desert.
“It makes a difference for kids like me to come to some place that has so much more available,” she said, praising the work of COCA for this area’s robust arts offerings.
County Administrator Vince Long explained the proposal would be a structural change intended to maximize the impact of these TDT dollars.
“The current structure limits our ability to fully align how we fund culture and arts in our community,” Long said as he made the case for shifting this responsibility to Visit Tallahassee, the area’s tourism marketing organization.
“This would align culture and arts funding with tourism’s other grant processes, their professional administrative oversight and infrastructure, their significant marketing and advertising efforts, as well as our ability to align more closely with the organizational and operational capacities of the broader Leon County organization,” Long said.
“Any kind of change that’s this monumental is going to impact the whole entire sector and it will definitely impact COCA,” Kathleen Spehar told us. She’s executive director of COCA.
“There’d be a dramatic reduction in services,” Spehar said. She spent a chunk of the last county commission meeting speaking off to the side with Chairman Christian Caban. He put the proposal on the agenda, and he later requested a workshop to gather more information.
Click LISTEN above to hear the full conversation.
