There has been much discussion lately about the donations that the City makes.  There are typically two kinds of donations: Arts and Humanities.  First a little background:

City:  In the City, there is a spreadsheet that contains all of the organizations that apply.  As a part of the process, each org. fills out an application, goes to a meeting to cover the grants process and they attend a Council meeting where they make their pitch.  Their data is then presented to a subcommittee that weighs all of the applications and decides at what level (if any, not everyone is succesful) to fund the applications.  This is a decision of the Council.  I like the fact that the Council is directly responsible for this decision.

County: I’m not very familiar with the process in the County but the “Arts” side of the process is handled by the PWC Arts Commission (might have the name wrong).  I’m not sure how they handle the humanitarian side but my impression is that it is typically handled by the individual Supervisors through their “Discretionary Fund” (Council members don’t have these).

For my part, I’ve struggled with these.  It’s easy to rail against the “Arts” side but the Christmas and St. Patricks parade are under that side.  There’s some good stuff in there and I’m not voting against the parades friends.  I’m not wild about some of the humanities either – some are quite large organizations but some are large organizations who use that increment of funding to do something in our community.  I’ve kinda made an uneasy peace with it but I do believe that some further changes need to be made to the process.  Oh, one last thing, the funding level for the entire batch of requests has remained at about $200k.

Now, I have a single additional ground rule for this post: this is a philosophical debate.  If you rail against anyone in particular (except me) I’ll delete your post – I’m going to have a hair trigger on this one.  ALSO!!  I will need to ask your forgiveness as I don’t have the list of applicants in electronic format.  I know that might help but I just don’t have it – it’s hundreds of pages and I don’t have the time to scan it.  It’s a HUGE business week for me and I’m busting my ass…..