No Taxpayer Funding For Art
If you had an extra $300,000 to improve Saskatoon, how would you spend it?
Would you repair roads?
Improve parks?
Support public safety?
Most people would probably have a long list of ideas.
Very few would likely answer:
"Let's buy three artificial rocks."
Yet that's exactly the conversation taking place at City Hall after the City spent nearly $300,000 on a public art installation consisting of three recycled plastic boulders.
Whether you love the artwork or hate it isn't really the point.
The real question is much simpler:
Should taxpayers be paying for art at all?
We don't think they should.
Art can be valuable.
It can make communities more interesting, inspire people, provoke discussion, and add character to spaces.
But something having value doesn't automatically mean taxpayers should be forced to pay for it.
There are plenty of individuals, businesses, charities, foundations, and community organizations that support the arts.
If people believe a particular piece of art should be created, they should be free to contribute their own money to make it happen.
But City Hall doesn't have its own money.
It has your money.
And when City Hall spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on art, that's money collected from Saskatoon taxpayers who had no choice about whether they wanted to support the project.
That's particularly difficult to justify when many taxpayers are already struggling with the cost of living.
The City has real jobs that they're supposed to be responsible for.
Roads, water infrastructure, parks, transit, safety, emergency services, and such.
Every dollar spent on art is a dollar that can't be spent on those priorities - or simply left in taxpayers' pockets in the first place.
The nearly $300,000 spent on three artificial boulders isn't the only issue.
Saskatoon actually has a policy that builds funding for public art directly into the budgets of major capital projects.
Whenever the City's contribution to a capital project is at least $5 million, 1% of the project's budget is allocated toward a public art or artistic design element.
City managers are directed to automatically incorporate this cost into their project budgets, meaning Council often doesn't even discuss it.
To be clear, this is on top of all the other ways the City uses your taxes to fund public art.
Tomorrow at 9:30 am, Council's Governance and Priorities Committee will consider a motion from Councillor Randy Donauer to eliminate this particular automatic funding stream.
We think that's a step in the right direction.
But we also think City Council should go further.
Rather than simply changing how taxpayer-funded art is paid for, City Hall should get taxpayers out of the business of funding art altogether.
If residents want more art in Saskatoon, there is nothing stopping individuals and organizations from raising money, sponsoring projects, donating works, or finding other voluntary ways to make that happen.
Taxpayers shouldn't be forced to foot the bill.
If you agree that City Hall should focus taxpayer dollars on core municipal priorities and leave the funding of art to those who voluntarily choose to support it, please sign our petition to tell City Hall No Taxpayer Funding For Art.
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