For New York City’s cultural institutions, the dance is starting again. 

Not a literal dance, like one that would grace the stage of the Brooklyn Academy of Music or Carnegie Hall.. 

This dance is the budget dance: Mayor Eric Adams’ latest $155 million budget proposal for the city’s cultural affairs department, while higher than City Hall’s proposed spending last year, is much lower than what arts organizations want to see. The department’s full budget in the current fiscal year, including one-time add-ons from the City Council, was $232.7 million.

To help reinvigorate and expand programming at cultural institutions that are still recovering from drops in visits during the pandemic, advocates and council leaders are advocating for a $100 million bump in permanent funding for the city’s culture agency. 

At a recent budget hearing, Councilman Chi Ossé, chair of the council’s cultural committee, said he was “‘disappointed, and frustrated at the failure of the administration to properly support our cultural communities.”

“Despite all they have done for our city when we needed them most, our cultural organizations have been failed by the administration,” Ossé said. 

In the hearing, cultural commissioner Laurie Cumbo defended the budget proposal, and noted that typically the council adds significant one-year funding ahead of the budget’s adoption.

“Mayor Eric Adams has been completely supportive of the arts and culture community in New York City,” Cumbo said. “To look at the numbers at this time, and to make a comparison from one fiscal year to where we are now, is not really a fair comparison.”

Yet after two years of serving communities through a public health emergency — and in some cases also serving as destinations for tests and vaccinations — some leaders of arts organizations are tired of going out to the protracted budget ball, and would like to see a higher level of arts funding made permanent in city finances. 

“The idea that any of us have to come to the dance again, having to prove that we know how to dance, it’s exhausting,” said Leonard Jacobs, the executive director of the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, in Queens. “It takes us away from the service that we provide to the people of New York.”

After a 2022 budget that saw large influxes of federal funding from pandemic relief bills, many city agencies are seeing proposed cuts for fiscal year 2023, including some that Adams has counted among his administration’s priorities. 

In his campaign, Adams’ platform on the arts cited the damage done to the creative economy by COVID-19, saying that the city has a “responsibility to not only  assist freelancers and organizations struggling to make ends meet, but also to fully tap into the power of our creative class and invest in it.”

Ossé said in an interview ahead of the budget hearing he felt that the funding changes represented a departure from how Adams’ pitched the executive budget to the council, as a blueprint for providing economic support for marginalized communities.

“I do believe that cuts like this, even if they are proposed cuts, do not match that message, and do not match the sentiment that he shared in that briefing,” Ossé said. 

Cumbo said that the current budget proposal allows for her agency to hire six new full-time positions, which she said will help with processing grant applications more quickly than in years past and in helping cultural organizations navigate the process of receiving city assistance. 

The department is also doubling the floor for grants from its Cultural Development Fund, from $5,000 to $10,000. 

Jacobs, a former director of the Cultural Institutions Group program at the cultural affairs department, said he was confident that the council would not sign off on a budget that includes significant losses in funding for these organizations

“The votes won't be there,” he said. 

Ossé said he would like to see the budgets for the NYPD and the Department of Correction — revised up in the executive budget — reduced, and have some of that money go towards cultural affairs. 

“When Mayor Adams talks about skimming the fat, it seems as if the Department of Correction and the NYPD are left off the hook, when there are so many other agencies and initiatives that need at least a drop of that funding to thrive and to bring us to a greater economic recovery,” Ossé said. 

Ossé and leaders of cultural institutions are pushing for a $100 million infusion into cultural affairs, which they are calling the Visionary Investment in Building the NYC Economy, or VIBE.

The program would direct $25 million to the 34 organizations in the Cultural Institutions Group, $25 million to the city fund that makes grants to other arts groups, $5 million to increase staffing in the cultural affairs department and $45 million for initiatives that would support groups led by people of color, renew the City Artists Corps program and fund workforce development. 

Taryn Sacramone, the executive director of the Queens Theatre, said the VIBE program would represent a “down payment” toward making arts funding one percent of the city budget; with the added $100 million, the city’s total culture spending would hit a quarter of a percent.

“Stabilizing our organizations would enable us to plan further out, hire permanent positions, all of those things,” Sacramone said. 

Sacramone and Jacobs said they were confident that Ossé and Council Speaker Adrienne Adams — an amateur singer who has performed on the stage of the Jamaica Center for Arts — would fight for a strong culture budget. 

Yet Jacobs said that he hopes the VIBE initiative will push the city toward a point where cultural groups don’t have to take months out of each year directing their focus toward pushing city leaders to recognize their value — something he recognizes that every component of the city, from libraries to hospitals, must do during the budget process. 

“It’s naive to think that we would not be expected to have to make our case every year,” he said. “Is it an allocation of resources and energy and time that takes us away from serving school children, or seniors or families? Yes. But we don't try to change the entire system, we try to function within it.”