DeSantis selfishly guts Florida arts and culture funds
John Delaney, a former Republican mayor of Jacksonville who later became president of the University of North Florida and Flagler College, has what’s become a kind of ready-made line when he needs to defend much-maligned liberal arts programs in higher education — the types of things Tallahassee legislators like to target with budget cuts.
“We want to be Athens, not Sparta,” he’d say. “We need artists, actors, teachers, poets, writers.”
Some of the larger line items Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed last week out of the $116 billion budget were about $32 million for arts, culture and museum grants and related projects, a stunning blow to hundreds of organizations across the sprawling state: children’s choruses, opera houses, symphonies, theatres, zoological societies, cultural councils. This was a cruel, crude and first-of-itskind across-the-board gutting the governor didn’t even try to justify. We can only guess at DeSantis’ strange hostility toward arts and culture funding, but it’s difficult to avoid concluding from this blackout that DeSantis must view Florida’s cultural institutions as a threat to the peculiar political culture he is trying to cultivate instead — a reactionary and spartan one.
The governor bragged about his nearly $1 billion in vetoes, which he said helped keep the budget for the next fiscal year below this year’s spending. That eye-rolling technicality — cheap, talking-point gimmickry — came with an enormous cost in a state chock-full of needs. It’s also bad fiscal management and self-sabotage: arts and culture spending has a meaningful return on investment. “The state has an overall nine-to-one return on investment from these grants that generate hundreds of millions in tax revenue and fuel our local economy,” Carlos Guillermo Smith, who just won a Central Florida state Senate seat, told USA Today Network reporter John Kennedy.
Beyond the erasure of arts and culture