Deputy Speaker Williams questions OMB on cultural funding baselining

Thank you.

Hello.

Hello.

Hi.

Just a question about the cultural funding.

So in the council's budget response, we called on the administration to baseline the $30 million that was received in a one-shot last year to adequately fund the ongoing needs of the city's cultural organizations, the exec plan.

Thankfully, it included $10 million baseline, but we wanted to know if the administration would be adding the remaining $20 million baseline funding to the adopted budget.

We all value our cultural institutions together.

I know we all agree on that.

We were happy to put up the $10 million into baseline.

I do think that we look forward to having the discussion with you and with the council on additional funding moving forward.

Obviously, with the...

you know, with the overall fiscal constraints in mind and to try to figure out how we can provide more to our cultural institutions.

Okay.

And just wanted to have a little bit more understanding as to why you all chose the $10 million to include in the exec budget,

which I'm sure you know forces a lot of the cultural organizations to continue to operate year to year with a lot of budget uncertainty.

Yeah, it was a matter of just looking at the total funding envelope of the executive budget and with, you know, the commitment to see that we could

put up funding for the institutions that we care about and not sort of wait or defer them to adopted budget negotiations.

So we had picked.

The 10 million because of the funding envelope.

But we recognize that it's also a significant priority for the council.

We share the fact that we want to invest in our cultural institutions, and we'll look forward to those discussions over the next few weeks.

Okay, just to jump around a bit and tease this out, but I definitely have a ton of more questions on this topic, as well as libraries.