The Sedona City Council plans to increase the funding it gives to arts and culture and nonprofit organizations through its Small Grants Program from $200,000 to $350,000 next fiscal year with the twin goals of shaping the policies of those organizations and attracting the right kind of tourist.

Vice Mayor Holli Ploog proposed the city both increase its contributions to arts organizations and align its arts funding with its tourism aims.

“In fiscal year 2008-09, we had a different process where the arts community got $120,000 worth of funding from the city and it was considered to be related to tourism,” Ploog said during council’s retreat on Dec. 14. “They just filled out an application … and then they were awarded money. Since 2008, more and more what I’ll call social service, human service organizations have applied, so where it used to be more like 60-40 arts to social services, now it’s the reverse, where the arts have been reduced from $120,000 to $86,000 just in those two years.”

“The group that evaluates feels torn between funding for the arts, which tends to be a higher amount, and funding for the human services, social services,” Ploog continued. “The chamber, years ago, used to fund events. I’ve looked at other cities and they fund events that bring in tourists. Example of the [Sedona International] Film Festival, it certainly is available for locals, but it brings in a huge number of tourists … Why wouldn’t we potentially want to separate out the funding … so that they’re not torn, so that we have a budget for the arts that I would propose comes out of bed tax money, and a budget for the human services, social services end.

“Council for years funded the arts through tourism.”

“Our support for the arts is decreasing,” Ploog said. “I don’t think we are an arts community anymore, the way we used to be, and I would like to see us go back to being that community.”

Adjusted for inflation, $120,000 in 2009 would be equivalent to $170,827 in 2023. The city of Sedona’s arts budget for FY24, administered separately from the small grants cycle, was $178,130, an increase of $20 from FY23.

“Is this not maybe better as part of our tourism department?” Councilwoman Jessica Williamson asked. “Rather than having it part of the small grants at all? It’s marketing and it’s promotion and it’s all that … It’s more like a service contract.”

Ploog noted that City Manager Karen Osburn “was not ready to move it to the tourism department.”

Osburn said she had no qualms about council designating separate pots of money for arts programs versus other programs for the small grants committee to allocate.

“That should be a very easy administrative tweak,” Osburn said.

“It really is kind of a policy decision around how much do we as a city want to be dedicating to arts,” Osburn added. “It’s a distribution issue.”

“All these arts applications, they are all bringing the right kind of people here that we’re trying to bring, so that would work more toward tourism,” Mayor Scott Jablow said.

“The people who attend these events are the people we’re targeting as our ideal tourist,” Ploog said.

Councilwoman Kathy Kinsella said that she would support increasing the small grants funding and pre-allocating portions of it “as long as staff can direct the committee appropriately.”

“For me, the key word or phrase is ‘community benefit,’” Councilwoman Melissa Dunn said. “It’s going to be based on our decision around the policies associated with the requests and the direction therefore that we want to do … What direction do we want to give to these organizations?”

“I think we do need to establish a support for the arts program in a more direct way,” Williamson said.

After discussion of the new funding level for small grants and how it should be divided, council agreed on $350,000 for the coming fiscal year. During the council’s budget work sessions in June, Small Grants Work Group Chairwoman Stephanie Giesbrecht had recommended that funding be increased to $350,000 for the next grant cycle.

The council also adopted Kinsella’s proposal to direct a minimum of 40% of the funding to arts and a minimum of 40% to human services, with the remaining 20% to be allocated “at the discretion of the committee.” The committee will be tasked with deciding which organizations and events are eligible for which category of funding.

In addition, the city has commissioned a new study on the economic effect of arts in the community in conjunction with the Sedona Arts Center, which will be presented at SAC on Feb. 1, 2024