As some have commented on this site, it is one of the cruel ironies of Embassy Square that the city’s heavy investment/donation/loan to the cultural center between Breckenridge and Winder streets has left Henderson unable to finance any cultural endeavors.
From the Vance County Arts Council to the Vance County Historical Society to one of the core parts of Embassy Square, the H. Leslie Perry Memorial Library, the institutions that have provided some semblance of cultural and intellectual life to those of us at home in Henderson are hammered in the proposed city budget.
We’ll let Jennifer Madriaga, the executive director of the Arts Council, explain the plight of her agency, as she described it in an e-mail message: “The Vance County Arts Council operates on a shoestring budget and already provides a number of services to the school system and general community for free. Funding has been cut on all levels, locally and statewide. The city contribution accounts for about one-fourth of our total income/revenue source for fiscal year. This decision will drastically cut the number of programs that we are able to offer. We have already had to cut down on programming because of decreasing support from local governments and the continuing loss of corporate support from entities like Harriet and Henderson, who at one time gave $10,000 a year. The Arts Council now has an operating budget that is one-half its size from the 1990s. City and county governments cannot expect that an improvement in quality of life will occur if they cut funding in the arts, which has been demonstrated to raise test scores for students, improvcommunity relations, and provide economic stimulus through a creative class. It is frustrating that funding is being cut during a time that the city, the county, the general public are increasing pressure on area agencies to provide MORE SERVICES with LESS FUNDING.”
The Arts Council asked for $4,000 from the county and the same amount from the city. County Manager Jerry Ayscue’s budget proposal includes $1,000 for the council, half of the current budget. Henderson’s proposed budget offers the Arts Council exactly nothing, though we noticed that City Manager Eric Williams was a happy participant in the council-sponsored Blackout Arts Festival recently.
The Arts Council also sponsors student art contests that would be wonderful to display in the new McGregor Hall gallery at Embassy Square, assuming the council can survive.
As for the Historical Society and its museum in the former First National Bank Building on South Garnett Street, Tem Blackburn laid out the sad truth for the City Council in February: Unless the city and county are willing to put up about $10,000 each to fix the air-conditioning system, the museum is doomed.
The county at least is maintaining its current commitment to the museum — a building it jointly owns with the city — by budgeting $3,500 for utilities. The city budget is zero.
We hope to discuss the museum in depth sometime soon. For now, what matters is that Henderson is willingly giving up its strongest link to a past that’s far more impressive than most folks around here would suspect. That’s important because a big part of lifting ourselves out of our economic malaise is about having faith that it’s possible. And it’s a lot easier to believe that great things are possible in Vance County’s future when you know about the great things in the past.
Still, the most obvious case is the H. Leslie Perry Memorial Library, which is simultaneously the biggest beneficiary of the Embassy Square Foundation and one of its primary victims.
We’ll never understand how no one in power outside the library’s board of trustees ever grappled with the obvious: If you triple the size of the library, you’re going to increase operating costs. We can’t blame county officials for the oversight because Embassy Square isn’t their baby — we’re told that the city courted the library to become part of the project for six months before mentioning anything to the county.
We also can’t buy Williams’ argument that the city does more than its fair share to maintain the county library. First, the 3-cent standard Williams clings to (3 cents on the property tax rate, as approved by a city referendum in 1951) would be meaningful if the city tax rate were the same as it was 54 years ago; it’s not. Second, Williams violates his own 3-cent principle by budgeting for two months of operations in the new building on top of the money 3 cents of property tax would produce; either library funding is capped or it isn’t. Third, the city can’t seize the task of building a new library that it will own by itself, then turn around and insist that the library is mostly the county’s responsibility.
We do give Ayscue and Williams credit for creativity in dealing with the library operations for the coming year in a creative fashion. They arbitrarily decided that the new library won’t be ready until May 1, even though library director Jeanne Fox expects to be in the building by March 1 and the Embassy Square Foundation hasn’t wavered from statements that the building itself will be finished in December.
Of course, the two-month solution does nothing to address the problem of running the new library for a full year in fiscal 2006-07. But that’s a whole year away; why worry?