Back in the early 2000s, local arts leaders first came up with the idea of a publicly funded stream of money for arts and culture in Cuyahoga County. That stream was approved by county voters in 2006 when they agreed to a tax on cigarettes; it was renewed in 2015. It’s set to expire in 2027, and on November 5 it’s on the ballot again with a significant increase since revenue has declined as smoking rates have gone down. We are urging people to vote yes on Issue 55 to fund a segment of our community that produces infinitely more economic benefits to the region than a football team.
We are certainly aware of many of the complaints about the tax and the way the money had been deployed. We’ve written extensively about many of them, especially the dysfunction at Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, the organization tasked with distributing the funding, the elimination of the individual artist fellowship program, and the inherent inequity of a cigarette tax that hits poorer residents and minorities harder, since people of color and less affluent people smoke in higher numbers. We’d love it if they could find another, fairer way of funding the arts.
They can’t. They were handed the cigarette tax by the Ohio state legislature as the only one they were allowed to pursue. This is where issues start to have interactive impact and why you also need to vote YES on Issue 1 to undo gerrymandering in Ohio. Currently, about 53-55% of voters vote to send a Republican to the state legislature, but the GOP has a daunting 75% majority there. And that GOP majority leans heavily white, male, rural and small town, and southern Ohio. It doesn’t care about Ohio’s urban areas and it doesn’t care about the arts. If anything, it’s hostile to them.
What we’d really love to see from an enlightened legislature — the opposite of the one we have now — is statewide arts funding. Think about this: the initial annual income to Cuyahoga County from the cigarette tax was about $20 million a year, now less than $10 million. Arts supporters hope to get that close to its former level if Issue 55 passes. Meanwhile, the cost of school voucher programs that now pay affluent families to send students who never set foot in a public school to fancy private schools is zeroing in on $1 billion dollars after being just a couple of million recently. Abolishing vouchers – admittedly a pipedream — or limiting them to less affluent families whose kids have attended public schools and found they didn’t serve their particular needs could free up a flood of money that would be more than enough to fund every community’s arts programs.
We ARE talking pipe dreams now though, and will be as long as we don’t restore balance to our state legislature. Meanwhile, that’s no reason to punish Cuyahoga’s many creative and vibrant arts organizations. These issues are related: Let’s vote YES on Issue 55 — and a big YES on Issue 1!
[Written by Anastasia Pantsios]
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