In case you missed it, Gov. Rick Scott and Florida legislators are spending record amounts of your tax dollars these days.
A few years ago, Scott described the $70 billion budget he inherited from Charlie Crist as “bloated.”
This year, he and his fellow fiscal conservatives managed to spend $88.7 billion.
Even drunken sailors are impressed.
Still, not everyone’s benefiting from the spending spree.
While prisons and toll roads are getting more, Tallahassee leaders gutted funding for arts and culture.
They slashed the state’s grant program — for museums, theaters, science centers and more — by nearly 90 percent, from $25 million down to $2.6 million.
That’s supposed to fund nonprofits all over the state.
By comparison, legislators committed $76 million to subsidizing the for-profit tourism industry.
Put another way: Arts and cultural grants dropped to 0.003 percent of the state’s $88.7 billion budget.
That’s three one-thousandths of a percent … during a year of record spending.
Welcome to Florida’s age of un-enlightenment.
The decision to slash funding at the Division of Cultural Affairs is short-sighted. It’s bad for education, quality of life, business recruitment and the economy in general.
Don’t take it from me. Take it from Scott’s own Department of State, which last year declared the Florida’s arts-and-cultural sector to be a $4.7 billion economic engine responsible for 132,366 full-time jobs.
The state touted the numbers in a release — and then Scott, House Speaker Richard Corcoran and Senate President Joe Negron proceeded to pull the rug out from the very industry being touted.
Why? Because nonprofits don’t ply politicians with campaign donations the way theme parks and cash-advance companies do.
And because cultural groups sometimes don’t do more than beg for crumbs and act grateful when they get them.
The cuts will be felt statewide. The Orlando Shakespeare Theater, for example, is expected to get only $9,606 (or 6 percent) of the $150,000 it was qualified to receive under the state’s own guidelines.
The Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center in Maitland will get 94 percent less than it qualified for as well, around $5,800.
Many of these groups are savvy financial stewards. They already raise more than 90 percent of their funds from private donors and ticket sales. But public funding has always been a key, if small, part of the financial pie — one that helps leverage other donations.
To some degree, I blame this state’s business community.
Business leaders know how important art and culture is to attracting and retaining talent. They talk about it at Rotary clubs and in meetings with newspaper editorial boards — and often pony up money themselves.
But when it comes to lobbying and public policy, they sit idly by while the arts get slaughtered.
When legislators threaten funding for Visit Florida or the state’s corporate incentives program, CEOs storm the Capitol. But when the pols take a butcher’s knife to the arts, the business leaders yawn.
I challenged Florida Chamber of Commerce CEO Mark Wilson on this point, saying there was scant lobbying evidence to prove that he and his business brethren really gave a whit about arts and culture.
“I think you’re bringing up a valid point,” he responded.
Wilson said that the Chamber has, in fact, identified arts and culture as one the state’s key “pillars” — crucial to luring and keeping companies and workers — but that his organization probably needs to do more to convey that to legislators.
That’s an encouraging response. I hope he follows though. We’ll be watching.
Really, though, politicians are simple-minded creatures. They respond to threats and rewards. When the NRA wants something, it threatens to run ads — or even recruits an opponent — against any legislator who defies it.
Maybe that’s what the arts and cultural groups need to do.
Forget begging and pleading. Spend a few hundred bucks on a postcard that says: “Ask State Reps. Bob Cortes and Mike Miller why they voted for a budget that slashed funding to the Holocaust center and the Shakespeare theater in their own districts.”
I guarantee you that will get their attention. It works for the NRA.
You can find the contact info for your senator or House member at www.leg.state.fl.us.
And don’t let your legislator tell you that school shootings or hurricanes were the problem this year. Arts and cultural funding has been on a steady decline for the last four years — even as spending overall went up.
These people find the money … when they want to.
smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com