Left off roster for county funds

By Denise Jewell Gee

February 10, 2012

Lawmakers who sought to put dozens of arts and cultural organizations back into the Erie County budget followed their own spending plan from 2010 to determine which should get money this year.

But the Buffalo & Erie County Botanical Gardens, which appeared on the original list, was left out of the latest round of funding.

Now, the Botanical Gardens Society is lobbying to get back on the list of organizations that receive county operational money.

“I think they fell through the cracks,” said Erie County Legislator Thomas A. Loughran.

David J. Swarts, president and chief executive of the Botanical Gardens, has contacted lawmakers to clear up what he believes was a funding oversight as the 2012 budget came together.

“My sense was that it was not an intentional decision to not fund the Botanical Gardens,” Swarts said. “I think the discussions were moving fast and furious, and they were trying to hold a coalition together and ultimately trying to ensure that whatever they produced would not be vetoed.”

Legislators in December struck a deal to give $931,841 to 37 arts and cultural organizations this year in an attempt to restore cultural funding that former County Executive Chris Collins had cut out of the budget.

With only a few weeks to make changes to Collins’ proposed budget and without a process in place to evaluate cultural funding requests,

legislators pulled up numbers for the last time those groups had been in the budget.

That was the last budget year the county used its Cultural Resources Advisory Board to review applications before Collins cut the groups from the budget.

Most organizations this year will receive the exact dollar amount they would have in 2010 under the Legislature’s plan. Not the Botanical Gardens.

The Botanical Gardens, which is owned by the county but run by the private Botanical Gardens Society, was in line to receive $322,000 in operational funds in 2010.

Collins, however, did not support giving the Botanical Gardens the funds, and the money was never distributed.

Why the organization was shut out of operational funding in the 2012 budget is less clear.

The Greater Buffalo Cultural Alliance asked legislators to return to the 2010 funding levels for most organizations but noted that the large amount the Botanical Gardens was slated to receive in 2010 would be difficult to fund.

Instead, the alliance asked legislators to “fund them as close to a requested level as possible.”

But there was never a formal process for the Botanical Gardens to ask for funds, and the budget was approved without money for the facility.

“They certainly would have put a request in,” Loughran said. “They were waiting for a process that was actually dismantled.”

Swarts has written a letter to legislators and asked for a meeting with County Executive Mark C. Poloncarz to discuss the funding.

“We think, out of fairness and out of need, the Botanical Gardens should receive consideration for funding in 2012,” he said. “We’re going to work very hard to make that happen.”

Lawmakers and leaders of local cultural organizations also say they hope to reinstitute a process by which they could review cultural funding each year so that all groups will have a formal way to submit funding requests.

“Hopefully, this is, to some extent, not a point we have to revisit year after year, because the process will already be established,” said Tod A. Kniazuk, executive director of the Arts Services Initiative. “Everyone interested in cultural funding will go through this process, and it will be merit-based.”

http://www.buffalonews.com/city/communities/erie-county/article727469.ece